And then there are the days when you stun the ever-active and loudly vocal eco-warriors into silence. The innocent lambs are suddenly noticing that the "crisis" and "necessity" they want to wake people up to is being taken out of their politically incompetent hands by forces that are not necessarily benign. Well who would have thought that would happen? I have kept asking them - who has to power and resources to push technology and policy to the scale involved in their climate demands? I've never received an answer from any of them. I'm just the awkward voice who, being isolated, they can ignore. When environmentalism is framed in miserabalist and catastrophist terms, don't be remotely surprised when it is taken only by miserable forces that don't have the best interests of humanity at heart.
I’ve been urging the need for a genuine politics and ethics since ever. By 'genuine' here I mean a view that recognizes the legitimacy and value of politics and ethics in themselves, not as secondary epiphenomena of the latest fashions in physics, evolutionary biology or neuroscience, the usual vague twaddle about interconnectedness. I have a great book by mathematician Simon Conway Morris that looks at all the improbable precision of all the great mathematical points of the universe, leading him to conclude that God exists. Whatever rows your boat. None of it proves anything. 'It' just 'is' and you can present the facts on all its operation all you like - you will still have to move onto the uncertain yes/no ground of agency, consciousness, will, ethics, politics, practical reason. That's the difficult bit - and you do need some good storytelling here, You also need to buttress moral agency and capacity, foster the right habits and character, create an environment in which it is possible to know, learn, acquire, and exercise the virtues, nurture and sustain right relationships. None of this has been done. Instead, there has been a focus on endless 'education,' as in a knowledgeable vanguard proselytising and pressurising. Lacking capacity, the imperative for action urged by these vanguards will be appropriated by those forces capable of action.
I have constantly warned of the dangers of framing the environment – and people – as problems to be solved by some institutional engineering and technocratic initiative. I simply have to laugh at this warning issued within the environmental camp to stop myself from going mad. I may as well have been writing in hieroglyphs for all the impact my writing has had on the environmental movement, warning at length of the dangers of the very thing they are suddenly becoming alive to. It may be too late in the day. They have spent decades in climate crisis and catastrophe mode that the lesson may well have gone too far deep in the public psyche to be easily turned around by a more optimistic narrative. Hilariously, activists have consistently claimed to be educating the public and raising awareness, on the pretence that climate change is never covered. It has been covered daily for decades, and covered far too much in the sense that the overwhelming emphasis has been on the problem rather than the solution and on agency not at all (mobilising activists around slogans and demands levelled on 'government' is the very antithesis of agency).
Anyhow, enough is by now more than enough for me. I sent out a few volleys on social media, giving links to various writings of mine on this. I was met with silence. That's some kind of progress. Five years or more ago I was met with dismissive comment and some abuse. You see, writing on metaphysics and morals really is akin to writing in hieroglyphs in an age governed by the fallacies of scientism.
. The dangers of eco-fascist appropriation have been obvious all along (certainly in the inhumanism, misanthropy, and Darwinism that stalks environmentalism from within). There is also the danger of the ever-escalating demands for climate programmes which are levelled upon an ever bigger ‘government,’ charged upon taxpayers, and handed over to big tech and the corporations. The incoherence is incredible. I split with the Green leadership in the UK on this, who criticized Corbyn's Labour as authoritarian in being the party of the state whereas they, the Greens, were the party of individual freedom. In the next breath they demand huge government investments, programmes and regulations. Appropriation is built into this kind of eco-activism and non-politics that you are left wondering who among the activists are strategists deliberately engineering this diversion and who are merely idealistic tweedle-dumbs. I’d suggest the vast majority are sincere, just political naifs who are so easy to expropriate it is sadly laughable.
Beware making crisis and necessity the key figures in your (non-) politics - such things are vulnerable to overspill, extension, and appropriation by forces much more politically capable (not least given the enviro pretence of being "beyond politics"). Naturalism is a dead-end. It is bad metaphysics and bad politics.
I supplied a link to my Posts page on Being and Place and urged people to scroll down the headings and look under, "The Republic in the Age of Moral Ecology" "The Logic of Collective Action" "The Field of Practical Reason" "Making Facts Existentially Meaningful" "The Springs of Action." They will find something in there that they desperately need.
As for storytelling, they can try the "POETRY, ART, AND LITERATURE" on my "Posts" page for "better storytelling" by way of a literary ecology. The sad truth is that this immense work in the field of practical reason, persuasion, and action has been ignored by those convinced that their science and logic contains all the answers. They don't and lack motive force. Which is why 'education' in this mode never gets anywhere - awareness may be raised but the question of 'now what?' is never answered.
I need a Reader to make the more pertinent writings accessible, something that distils the essence. But the metaphysics and morals of ecological transformation is in here, something which sets nature within the civic and moral environment.
I gave a link to the "Books" page for people to check out the longer works that address the arguments in greater depth.
The truth is that I no longer present these arguments within the eco-camp, despairing of the seemingly congenital incapacity of 'environmentalists' to see politics and ethics as anything more than secondary to scientific knowledge and technological know-how. That's profoundly wrong and it shows.
In fine I argue for metaphysics and metaphorics - for truth and moral knowledge, emphasising modes of communication and persuasion, and seeking to embed in habits, virtues, and practices. Taken together, that supplies environmentalism with an inner motive force. This is the alternative to vanguards of all kinds, the alliance of autocrats and psychocrats seeking to engineer change from above and outside.
But I won't hold my breath.