One of the accusations frequently made by climate change deniers or ‘skeptics’ against those who would like to see concerted action taken to ameliorate the impacts of anthropogenic global warming is that of being somehow apocalyptic. A related charge is that climate change activism is somehow a screen or cover for an unstated political agenda.
Futile as the attempt to deny and disavow the fact that a process of climate change is occurring, and that human actors are causal agents, it’s nevertheless the case that this discourse is not without its effects in the world. So it’s worth analysing this phenomenon.
There is no doubt that apocalyptic politics are in style.
Writing in his recent First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Slavoj Žižek diagnoses the range of contemporary apocalyptic politics. He quotes Ed Ayres:
We are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don’t really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming. For us, that “something” is a blitz of enormous biological and physical alterations in the world that has been sustaining us.
Žižek argues that “the dominant ideology is mobilising mechanisms of dissimulation and self-deception which include a will to ignorance”, and cites Ayres again to characterise this effect:
A general pattern of behaviour among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fail.
The fall of the Western Roman Empire is exemplary here. Throughout the fifth century, the distinction between Romans and barbarians is sharpened, the ideology of Roma Aeterna hyperbolised, even as the Empire’s military power begins to depend more and more on Ostrogothic armies to play off against other militarised populations in movement. The seat of power is the site not of stability, but of vicious contestation. Then, one day, Odoacer topples the house of cards, and takes power himself, without bothering to erect the screen of another puppet Emperor. Suddenly, the illusion is shattered, and the situation can be seen – in retrospect – in its true light. The Real reveals itself. (An apocalypse, properly understood, is a mode of veiling and unveiling a truth.)
Historians identify a number of points where action could have been taken – as late as the 460s – which may have prevented this. History, after all, is contingent, and events only appear necessary in retrospect. But what was blocking such action was precisely the inability to see and conceptualise the processes occurring as anything other than contingent and passing.
At the same time, particularly after the sack of Rome in 410, apocalyptic predictions were in the air.
For Žižek, transformations are at work which call forth such a doubled effect:
If this sounds apocalyptic, one can only retort that we live in apocalyptic times. It is easy to see how each of the three processes… refer to an apocalyptic end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives… At all these levels, things are approaching a zero-point; “the end of times is near”.
So there is no surprise that such profound tendencies towards paradigmatic change in the conditions of being human in the world call forth the twin ideological effects of blinkered conservatism and apocalyptic endism. In Žižek’s mind, there are four types of the latter: Christian fundamentalism, New Age spirituality, techno-digital post-humanism and secular ecologism.
Note that Žižek is not employing the concept of apocalypticism pejoratively. The apocalyptic is a mode of experiencing time, and it may be, that confronted with a genuine prospect of catastrophic transformation, it is the most germane, while the linear mode of continued progress and development is illusory. As with other political phenomena, apocalypticism in itself is a form rather than a content; an empty signifier which can attract to itself a variety of beliefs and imperatives.
To dismiss something as apocalyptic, then, is in itself a mode of disavowal.
What is certain is that a conservative stance (the Romanitas of the current aeon) is an impossibility. There is nothing to conserve. Global capitalism relies on constant change and upheaval, and the drive towards accumulation brings destruction in its path. It is the nature of the beast. So, a stance of denial towards climate change is – in its effects – a death drive, an imperative to maintain an illusion long past its necessary confrontation with the spectre of the Real. Think Peak Oil, think the colonisation of the biological and the Commons by commerce, think the destruction of forests and species. All this is real, and it may well be that limits to growth are fast approaching. The end of non-renewable resources, a phenomenon whose timing is the only issue over the next century or so, is a fact. To proclaim, metaphorically, “let’s party like it’s 1999″, is not an answer.
So, in a way, the psychology of conservative skepticism is “Après moi, le déluge”. And, of course, for Louis XIV, or rather for the mode of being that he embodied, the deluge arrived a few decades afterwards.
It will become increasingly clear, over the next few decades, that business as usual with a few tweaks is an impossibility. The current noise of ‘climate change skepticism’ will not survive confrontation with the Real; it’s a symptom of a fractured utopia.
Because the actual utopians in this picture are those for whom history has ended; the liberal ideologues whose complacency has already been disturbed, whose only response to transformational change is to deny it, because we already live in the best of all possible worlds. The conditions of possibility for such an attitude are already collapsing.
So, what is to be done?
It’s here that the role of the imaginary is crucial.
There is no necessity or certainty to the course of human affairs. It is eminently possible that the impacts of climate change, politically, might be a future of violent conflicts over resources, an increasing abrogation of human freedoms, uncontrolled population movements, and the continued reduction of politics to a corporate game.
In fact, that may well be the track we’re on.
But it’s not necessarily so.
As I alluded to above, events only appear necessary in retrospect. The necessity of the present moment is driven by a failure of imagination, or more properly, a refusal to imagine and a blockage of the imaginative faculty. If politics is the contest of the delineation of the contours of the social, economic and cultural; that is to say, the establishment of the conditions for how we shall live, then we don’t have much of it at the moment. We have the ‘administration of things’, and the best that we can manage is elite-driven technocratic tinkering.
We need to revive our faculties of imagination, in a future anterior mode. That is to say, we need to conceive of the end state we want to see – a juster, fairer and sustainable world order which can accommodate itself to the exigencies of climate change – and work backwards from there. In order to avert the apocalypse. That is a political task, and let there be no mistake about what we’re engaged in. So, in fact, secular ecologists need to work against the ‘end of days’; and to do so with an eye to the long term, not the short term noise of rabid denialism. “Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect” isn’t a bad slogan, still. We need to be realistic to confront the effects of the Real.
Thanks for this. It looks like a really interesting and important read.
It seems somewhat paradoxical that the climate change deniers are using the rhetorical move of asserting that climate change is simply and only a cover for a hidden political agenda when the challenge is that the task of imagining a new sustainable political world order that is called for by the reality of climate change has barely begun.
Indeed, Doug, and that’s the step we need to take as a matter of urgency, in my mind. The denialists are just a sideshow, and a distraction.
Thanks Mark,
May I suggest two other instances?
1. The threat of nuclear warfare, after the early 50s development by the Soviet Union of a massive nuclear arsenal comparable to the USA/UK store. This was the stuff of Cold War nightmares. Political leaders and citizens in many countries seemed dazzled-in-the-headlights and frozen. Small disarmament movements here and there but no massive public reaction until early 1980s (it took 3 decades I think, for political leaders to feel strong pressure). Then substantial arms reductions only after the collapse of the USSR and dissolution of its Eastern Europe satellite empire. Some observers were puzzled that with such a dire threat hanging over the globe, so little action to remove the threat seemed to be undertaken.
Peter Watkins film “The Journey” explored this question through interviews in many nations:
“I would visit families or groups of people in various countries, and interview them to find out what they knew about the state and consequences of the world arms race, and the effects of nuclear weapons. The interviews would also focus on the role that mass media and educational systems had played in shaping a world view, and the knowledge that these people had – or did not have – vis-à-vis these subjects.
The weapons are still stored; proliferation still threatens; little is said.
2. The collapse of Eastern European communist regimes around 1989: from Charter 77 to Protestant Church protests in the DDR, to the velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia and an explosion of violence in Romania; with the Chinese regime surviving its own explosion of violence in June. A long, slow process from the late 1940s, or from Gdansk in the early 70s or 1980. Taking most Western commentators by surprise. Yet when the first leaks began, and the creaking vessel took on water; news quickly spread from cabin to cabin, lifeboats were launched, and the ship went down quite quickly.
Were the commentators simply accustomed to thinking of a bipolar Europe, frozen in Yalta-time? Did they feel that previous protests in Eastern Europe had come to very little, so no large change was likely in 1989? (A kind of “empirical” judgement?)
Thanks, Ambi – good examples. Zizek refers to the revolutions in Eastern Europe to note how ‘cynical realism’ is often wrong; for instance, Henry Kissinger completely accommodated himself to the coup against Gorbachev in 91.
Crikey, Mark.
That coup attempt was a bit hair-raising for a few days. Cometh the hour, cometh the man: Yeltsin clambering up on a tank to exhort the coup leaders to desist. Then confronting Gorby in Parliament a few days later….
(And then, a few years later, having the Parliament shelled by his military forces.)
Cometh the power, cometh the autocrat.
Excellent post, Mark, and worthy of substantial discussion.
I completely agree, but unfortunately I think it is an answer for an unholy alliance of governing elites and those enculturated into the neoliberal understanding market governance. However, there are fundamentally incommensurable paradigms at work in contemporary government that will end in tears. On one side there is NSW and Qld Labor Right’s continued plans to continue the expansion of coal export facilities as if such signals exist in an hermeneutic vacuum (‘the Chinese will just get it from somewhere else’ etc.) and Rudd’s plans to expand our population despite persistent water shortages and alarming food supply projections over coming decades. On the other side there is the ecological understanding of limits and scarcity you allude to. There are cross-cutting paradigms like ‘resilience’, but in the Australian context they’ve barely made a mark. The partying like it’s 1999 attitude represents the promise of simply outsourcing our problems and their solutions – swap bits of paper with Indonesia and maybe lock up some forests, and voila we’ve made an X% reduction in our emissions.
Your definition of politics, “the contest of the delineation of the contours of the social, economic and cultural” becomes more like the sub-politics of Beck and Latour in this context – that is, matters nominally considered technical but require judgements that are inherently political in their effects. The problem, of course, is that ‘climate’ refers to a meta-narrative of measurements through statistical averages, deviations etc. (rather than direct observations), and measurement is normally lauded for its anti-political effects. I think technocratic problems breed technocratic solutions – the nuclear wedge is substantial in this sense and the Libs know it.
A key challenge in producing the kind of politics you gesture towards will be carving out deliberative spaces in the key areas of climate concern; and top amongst them is electricity governance. Direct public oversight of electricity supply and distribution decision-making has been a holy-grail for many NGOs for a long time, and for good reason. Progress on that front this year, as asset sales in NSW and Qld once again make front pages (and letter boxes!) will be an interesting litmuss test of the revival of politics you describe.
Great read, really enjoyed it. I’d be interested to check out the rest of Žižek’s book.
I thought that “If this sounds apocalyptic, one can only retort that we live in apocalyptic times.” was particularly pertinent.
Excellent example because the international weapons inspection regimes has taken an awfully long time to develop but is now a formidable apparatus of satellite and expert ground monitoring. It will be interesting to see how emissions monitoring also develops this year, as China submitting to robust measurement of its emissions was a key sticking point in the negotiations.
Thanks Mark. I especially like your formulation:
“That is to say, we need to conceive of the end state we want to see – a juster, fairer and sustainable world order which can accommodate itself to the exigencies of climate change – and work backwards from there.”
Working backwards tactically: no nuke power, no nuke powered ships.
To balance the global authority of capital: global labour organisation. Drawing on the past for the future equals the renewal of the OBU.
@6 – good thoughts, Declan.
I think the challenge is to politicise these issues properly rather than having them determined by the sort of sub-politics Beck and Latour diagnose. I don’t underestimate how much that will take, but that’s where my Gramscian slogan comes in.
The ways in which movements relate to state power is the key here, I think.
@7 – thanks!
@9 – anthony, that’s where it gets interesting. To some degree, such progressive regimes as do exist rest on a base not of a unionised working class but rather of a transposed and recoded peasantry/lumpenproletariat. But, in the local and global contexts, one should work for an alliance between green and labour movements. Again, that’s not a simple task. I’m not in full agreement with Zizek in the way he gestures to a solution, by any means, though I think there’s a lot of power in his diagnosis. But I do like the idea of a multiplicity of points of intervention which can converge on one change. It’s there, I believe, that the role of the social imaginary is crucial; that is to say, by a process of socially and collectively imagining the end point desired.
An earlier Zizekian concept is that of ‘cynical distance’ – the practice of using cynicism (or other ploys) to feign distance to a process to which one is nonetheless implicated. In a sense, we can expect nothing other than that conservatives and interest groups will deny any need for resources to be allocated to the environment – this is their job. The cynical distance is that which is apparent (arguably) in the average punter in the US or UK, who more or less blithely accepts government inaction on the environment, poverty, etc, whilst the same government is throwing cash, hand over fist, to the finance sector. This is partly Zizek’s point (in his recent film, Michael Moore makes a similar point, albeit, without the Lacanian pyrotechnics) – the past decade was marked by two crises – 9/11 and the GFC – and each engendered a ‘state of exception’ that basically allowed governments to walk all over people, and to ignore the genuinely pressing issues of the day. The shocking thing is not that governments act in this way, but that there is so little resistance to it. Finally, as Zizek is often wont to say, it is as if we are all Fukuyamists now.
“A general pattern of behaviour among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fail.”
That’s true at both micro and macro levels of humanity. Many humans respond to symptoms of life threatening illness by ignoring them until too late, or focus instead on less vital anxieties, solutions to which seem possible, but which in fact exacerbate their health crisis.
One sees the Americans doing this with the apocalyptic threat of climate change on several fronts. In the last few days I’ve been appalled to hear first the sabre rattling of the American right about the Yemen after the terrorist bomb scare followed all too soon by strong statements from Obama and Brown about the need to combat terrorism there “at the highest level.”
It feels horribly similar to the run up to the invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq. And we know how healthy and wealthy and able to cope with myriad problems that left Uncle Sam and its allies. One despairs of the USA and other governments ever being likely to develop the wisdom and “optimism of the will” necessary to solve the problem of climate change.
My only source of optimism is the evidence of spontaneous and widespread action by the body politic locally. At the micro level of illness in the individual the heart often gainsays the head subliminally, or the stomach rejects toxic and addictive food bringing to awareness the need for other more drastic remedy. Perhaps at the macro level citizens and civil society will bring national governments to their senses as individuals learn to re-cycle and deploy resources more rationally and businesses, corporations and state run industries bring about the changes which environmental constraints demand.
Btw, I agree with that, dk.au. That’s the point I was making about the indeterminancy of the future. It may well be that partying like it’s 1999 continues apace, but it will meet increasing resistance as it itself shifts the conditions – both ecological and social/political – it meets. But the outcome could well be quite dystopic. There’s something in the disavowal of apocalypticism which also tends to bring about the ruination of what is, which is one of my points. On the other side of the coin, the spectre of Thermidor looms; which is one of the bits of Zizek’s desired future I don’t like. But, in a way, I think he’s seeing accurately and acutely a certain tendency – which is an oscillation between authoritarian solutions of either neo-liberal or pseudo-ecological types. That’s the opposition we need to escape, through imagining a just future order.
@12 –
Yes, THR. Precisely.
Good post Mark. I see youre on a Zizek kick at the mo!
“The current noise of ‘climate change skepticism’ will not survive confrontation with the Real; it’s a symptom of a fractured utopia.”
Yes, quite. its the ghost dance phase – all we have known can be preserved through magical thinking. It rarely lasts more than a few years.
I guess my own view is that the “confrontation with the real” for skeptics wont necessarily mean the victory of science, or certain modes of scientific rationality. Its the lack of credibility among the ordinary punters that will kill denialism off. People are noticing things aren’t like the used to be, and no amount of ranting by Bolt et al will change people’s gut feelings.
An interesting post Mark, deserves some consideration. I am especially drawn to your comments about the failure to encourage imagination.
A serious problem emerges is that we cannot predict the future which in turn empowers the supporters of the status quo, evidenced by this example; we know capitalism is flawed and that a free monetary system propagates systemic inequality yet any criticism is rebuffed with the taunt of what is the alternative?
I’m not sure that the Cold War Nuclear Apocalypse scenario has been conveniently subverted by popular acclaim in the sense that considerable arsenals still exist and there has been a slow proliferation that increases the risk of a small scale nuclear flashpoint erupting with unknown consequences.
However the prospects are not necessarily bleak unless widespread denial of the obvious continues. The voices of dissent need to get louder before we get any real change.
@16 – yep, Lefty E. Though, as I said, I’m not at all convinced by Zizek’s version of the “communist hypothesis”, or his ultra-Hegelianism for that matter…
@17 – dave, I think that the “there is no alternative/critique is worthless without an alternative” pairing is incredibly disabling. Again, it needs escaping. Having said that, there is a surfeit of excellent critique followed by very jejeune suggestions of alternatives. We have to think bigger, and I think the future anterior mode of thought is a necessity at this juncture.
I tend to refrain from saying anything about the ideas of theorists I’ve never heard of, but the above example is something that should challenge every reader of this blog (and a few of it creators).
“New Age spirituality, techno-digital post-humanism and secular ecologism”. That last clause is about two thirds of everyone who passes through here. And I see Fran Barlow on the ‘Open Democracy Retrospective’ thread is writing about an intersection of computers and biotechnology, so I wonder if she can be added to the post humanists as well.
That’s some cat among the pigeons, Mark.
That’s where cats belong, Nickws!
And what’s wrong with that?
Nothing, if you’re a technocrat, that is!
George Monbiot had an interesting open conversation with Paul Kingsnorth that I think is relevant and itneresting, regarding whetehr western civilisation should be saved.
Gah, here’s the link that was supposed to be in that post:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/08/18/should-we-seek-to-save-industrial-civilisation/
Interesting quote from Monbiot’s side of the discussion, wilful: “When civilisations collapse, psychopaths take over.”
I would argue that that has already happened, quite a long time ago, without (as yet) collapse.
Me post-humanist? Not a chance.
*** ! The liMits to GroWth have been aPProaching since The inFlEctIon Point in The populaTioN gRaph dictated this as being so! ! ***
A good and well-argued thesis, Mark. With your invitation on the other thread in mind – and keeping to the strictures you laid down, can I offer some polite comments?
I’m not sure that the analogy with the fall of the Roman Empire is really made out. In the case of Rome, it may well be that the end could have been predicted and prevented. But what was predicted was imperial catastrophe, and not an apocalypse, in its true ‘end of days’ sense. To capture the sense of ‘apocalyptic’ you have to note its spiritual components: the ubiquity of sin, the prospect of an immiment ‘end of days’, the urgent imperative of repentence, and the certainty, given the required moral and behavioural changes, of redemption.
As you say, the fall of Rome was attended by fevered apocalypticim:
And this is an important clue. Apocalyptic is as old as Christianity. It was always there; but usually in the person of my lonely sandwich-board man. Generally, it caught the imagination of the people most intensely during periods of traumatic change. An interesting figure in this context is Girolamo Savanarola, the prophetic Dominican friar who came to dominate Florentine politics at the end of the 15th century. The long reign of the de Medicis had ended. The old certainties had been swept away. People were confused and dismayed by a world that seemed to have gone out of control. Into the breach stepped Savanarola, whose apocalytic vision promised continuity between past, present and future, and the prospect of ultimate renewal. Later, of course, when the political and military situations had been rectified, the Florentines burned him.
Time and again throughout the historical record, apocalyptic surfaces at times of (perceived) moral or political fracture. It has, of course (as I think you noted) been triggered by the historical timeline. All crossing points are dangerous, as cultural anthropologists have shown, including those of the body, but as time crosses significant boundaries, from one century to another, or one millennium to another, a sub-conscious sense of unease can give rise to apocalyptic outbreaks. Norman Cohn wrote a very good bood about this called ‘The Pursuit of the the Millennium’. I would suggest that the now widely-derided ‘Year 2K’ phenomenon was a pretty good example of a secularised millennarial apocalyptic.
As you say, Mark:
It remains a matter of opinion, perhaps, as to which side of the AGW debate is projecting what content into that empty space.
Mark @ 6
Yes the relationship between movements and the state is indeed an interesting way of conceptualizing the possibilities, but also the understanding of what a just future might entail. Are you aware of Samuel P. Hays’ Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency? Shows how progressive era engineers, geologists and hydrologists were instrumental in extending the scope of the modern American State.
dave @17:
“The voices of dissent need to get louder before we get any real change.”
To which Mark’s reply @18:
““there is no alternative/critique is worthless without an alternative” pairing is incredibly disabling”.
Both are correct. Mark compellingly so. Imaginative responses can avoid totalising alternative scenarios by honing skills at rebelliousness, contrariness and generalised refusenik conduct.
Creative experimentation is good but better when the trial makes legitmate demands of the state. If, for example, as has been proposed on another thread, current developments in rural policy lead to a further flight of rural population from the bush then it is feasible to offer alternatives for re-population that might include a contra-deal in which urban unemployment is reduced through farm co-ops whose role is to act as gardeners (literally) using de-industrialised technologies. Land tenure would be conditional on ecologically sustainable land management. The additional benefit of this idea is that the Maoists would be happy as Australia would finally develop a peasant class. And, before you ask, I’m not stoned, drunk or unemployed.
@30 – indeed, anthony! I haven’t been following their latest ruminations, but now that America isn’t The Last Superpower any more preparing the way for a bourgeois revolution in the Middle East, I’m not sure how much revolutionary jouissance there’s been in local Maoist circles!
@29 – don’t know it, dk. Was this connected with the progressive agenda and the birth of ‘useful’ social science as well? What time period are we talking about?
Oops, sorry, I see you said “progressive era”!
@28 – thanks for the comment, Rob.
Much older, in fact. And it was actually constitutive of Christianity. The taming of apocalyptic was in large part associated with Augustine, and precisely in response to the end of days mood the 410 Sack of Rome inspired – in Civitatis Dei. However, it’s had return after return in Christian culture. Even John Paul II was something of an apocalypticist. As with other such phenomena, it’s capable of multiple manifestations – it can return as a repressed element within the institutional Church, and it’s often associated in Catholicism with elements on the fringes – both left and right. But there’s no doubt that it’s a very present element in our culture, outside the properly religious frame, and as I argued, its time sense also has a cultural and social reality.
Cohn’s book is a bit dated now, by the way. In particular, his ascription of meaning to apocalypticism is questioned, as is his knowledge of the full gamut of sources – particularly Jewish ones. That’s not to say, of course, that it wasn’t a substantial and influential piece of scholarship at the time.
Mark @ 33 – yes, Cohn’s eclipse is an interesting example of the (inevitable) paradigm shift.
Maybe up to a point, Rob, but it’s also been supplemented by more rigorous historical scholarship, better informed by better historical evidence of European apocalyptic movements and also by a more precise understanding of the meaning and significance of the apocalyptic trope in Jewish scriptures and practices.
It’s still valuable, as I said, but I also think that the “sleep of reason produces monsters” theme is wrong. It’s based on an inadequate and fundamentally misconcieved view of what reason is, and a false opposition between so-called modern and pre-modern time senses (it’s better to think of a multiplicity of modes of time co-existing and re-iterating themselves in shifting ways).
For instance, the invaluable work of the Israeli scholar Gerhard Scholem, who died in 1982 (a friend and correspondent of Walter Benjamin’s) has only really had its due in the last decade or so. It’s interesting to see Zizek cite him in several places, and to recognise the cultural utility of Kabbalistic modes of thought in the philosophy of history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gershom_Scholem
I’m sure you’re right, Mark. My knowledge of the schoarship is over ten years old. Cohn even in my day was criticised for being over-sensational. Some of his stuff is faintly pornographic, which is probably why it appealed to us undergraduates.
I myself have often made comparisons between what happened with Rome and what’s happening now.
Firtly, I would argue that Rome recognised its inherent problems very early (part of the reason for the establishment of Constantinople). Yet, despite having a system which was far more amenable to imposed change than ours (emperors not being unduly worried by their chances at the next election), they were only ever able to tinker around the edges.
The lesson of that is that societies reach a point where major changes are simply not possible, which I think is where we’re at.
Secondly, I think it’s quite possible that what happened after the fall of Rome provides an analogy for our own future – that is, the human race will survive, but civilisation will be fragmented and in many places go backwards.
@37 – I don’t remember those bits!
I think the salient thing is to understand apocalyptic not as some sort of fringe phenomenon, but among the repertoire of our common cultural responses to making sense of the world. It’s also a mode of knowing, if you like – hence the aside I made about its meaning of both veiling and unveiling a truth. Weber’s comments on eschatology are transposable here – there’s a certain form to a mode of understanding and acting, but its substantive content is variable according to points of identification across the social field even at the same point in historical time. That’s all the more so with apocalyptic, because it’s an inbreaking into quotidian time.
Anyway, I wrote a chapter in my PhD thesis about this, and I have a bit of a scheme to retrospectively blog a distilled and refined versions of each chapter as a blog post as part of my work towards turning it into a monograph, now that it’s served its purpose as a thesis, so I may have a lot more to say about what recent scholarship in this area specifically shows, and around ideas of secularisation, the theological/political and culture more broadly in a little while.
@39 – that should read “Weber’s comments on theodicy” not on eschatology.
Thanks Mark for the essay.
Taking my cues from your final paragraph on the use of the imaginary:
I would add, paranthetically (without instituting a totalising political apparatus).
So I share your “optimism of the will” but my “pessimism of the intellect” warns me that previous attempts to re-shape the world order in a ‘juster, fairer and sustainable’ form have tended to result in mountains of corpses.
As you say, “[w]e need to be realistic to confront the effects of the Real.” Yet we also need to remove the present “blockage of the imaginative faculty” that prevents us from taking meaningful action to forestall the coming crunch.
An exquisite dilemma, and exquisitely presented! My imagination is certainly not up to the task, more’s the pity.
Oh, and you can put me down as a ‘techno-digital post-humanist’. But I’m not apocalyptic about it.
@41 – hehe!
Indeed, Mercurius, and therein lies the rub. But that holds true for liberal capitalism, as well, and the corpses are still piling up, even if some are undead and walking. There are a number of ways of understanding the imbrication of violence and the political, and Zizek is careful to reject the Hegelian notion that violence is necessarily justified by the Cunning of Reason in retrospect (if indeed that is a Hegelian notion). Another way of looking at it is that a regime of liberal democracy is founded in constitutive violence, but is relatively successful in avoiding continuing violence through the monopolisation of the means of that violence by the state, and a process of civilisation as well as pacification. But as Merleau-Ponty reminds us, this order is still (and probably must be) sustained by excesses of violence, even if pushed out to the periphery.
So I think we need to understand that the order we now inhabit cannot sustain itself without violence. One might consider for a start, the practices of some mining companies and the Indonesian military (or elements thereof) in Papua. Or the way ‘enterprise zones’ are sustained by murders and death squads in some Latin American countries. Or the institutionalisation of rape and torture in war. And that’s just for a start. These sort of things are not regrettable lapses, but actually intrinsic to the process of accumulation.
What this points to is another relation with the state. If it is the case that state power has the capacity or potential to minimise and reduce violence, and to bring about change, then it may well be that elements of the left need to overcome their allergy to state power, but of course, there are a stack of temptations and obstacles down that track as well. Again, as Zizek argues, you can consider someone like Lula or someone like Mandela as an example. In taking over state power, they face a choice of whether to disturb capitalist social relations of power, and if they go one way, capitalism bites back pretty quickly. But if they go the other way, what really changes in terms of inequality and injustice?
Life wasn’t meant to be easy, as Malcolm Fraser said!
Can I bridge the gulf between medieval superstition and AGW with a joke? (Thought I’d better ask first.)
If it’s an on topic joke!
However, I’d deny that there is such a thing as medieval superstition…
It’s NSFW.
Can anyone tell me what Zizek stands for politically? Yes, he’s clever, he’s good at the unusual juxtaposition and the upside-down conclusion. He has ideas. But he seems to be mostly irrelevant to actual politics of any form.
Bertrand Russell wrote somewhere that, in effect, 19th-century German idealism was a side effect of Germany’s situation as a territorially frustrated would-be great power. Bruce Sterling said something analogous of modern academic Theory: as the concrete political programs of big-picture intellectuals, like Marxism, became increasingly powerless and irrelevant, there was an involution of thought leading in increasingly arcane directions. This is not necessarily a bad thing intellectually – it’s the sort of historical change in external circumstances which produces both decadence and creativity.
Intellectuals are rarely in charge of anything, even when the state ostensibly supports their ideas. But with Zizek, I can’t even see how he fits in anywhere. He calls himself a Leninist, but then says he wants to figure out what that means. Occasionally he makes it into the universe of mainstream leftist punditry by writing a relatively accessible essay. But mostly he’s off in his own universe of Hegel, Lacan, popular culture, and current affairs. I can see him coming up with a formulation that catches on, but that’s about it, and it will be just one of a hundred ideas expressed in his writing, the rest of which never achieved currency.
It’s a bit like the difference between the Maoism of France’s Alain Badiou and the Maoism of Nepal’s Prachanda. Prachanda is the guru of a guerrila force which actually achieved power in Nepal. He has been central to politics, if you’re Nepalese. Badiou is a metaphysician and essayist read by other intellectuals, who occasionally gets an op-ed. His influence is at most subliminal and most likely close to zero in reality. And I think Zizek is like that too.
There’s a point there, mitchell, to be sure (although I don’t know if it’s really accurate to call Badiou a Maoist any more). Zizek might answer that it’s not the role of an intellectual to stipulate what sort of political activity should take place (and Badiou certainly would, because he rejects the formulation of a party form as the lever of change). As I said above, I don’t accept Zizek’s “communist hypothesis”. Where I do go along with him, though, is in insisting on the necessity of bold thinking as well as critique. However, I’d dispute your implicit formulation of the relationship between the role of ideas and what has an effect on the world. That’s explicit in my post, where I refer to the fact that the discourse of climate change denialism does have a real significance for what happens (if, I think, a symptomatic one), and the inability to come up with effective concerted action to ameliorate climate change is a problem of blocked thought – on one hand, by the power of the default, and on the other, by the sort of failure to imagine I’m talking about. That process of imagination, by the way, has to be a collective one, and it shouldn’t be a matter of deferring to some theoretical guru; Zizek or whoever. I do happen, though, to find aspects of his thought very sharp and useful.
OK. NSFW. This is boy joke.
I can’t remember where I got this from; it was either Guazzo’s ‘Compendium Malificarum’ or Kramer and Sprenger’s ‘Malleus Malificarum’, both of them late 15th-early 16th century witch-hunting manuals.
Archbishoprick.
Get it?
The point? The learned authors of these demonologies absolutely and earnestly believed that what was actually a medieval dirty joke was scientific proof of the existence of withcraft.
The joke? Like Guazzo, AGW advocates have bought a load of old bollocks.
(Sorry, Mark.)
Mark @ 42, yes I am well aware of the violence that is intrinsic to sustaining the present liberal democractic order. Consequentialist ethics dictates we’re responsible for that violence if we preserve the order that enables it, yet we’re equally responsible for violence that results from a totalising political apparatus in an attempt to change it. Hence the power of the imaginary is checked by ethical “cowardice”.
Thus you arrive at:
So, harking back to your original call for us to draw on the imaginary as a means to lead us out of the present fix, I would be looking in the first instance to formulate an ethical imaginary. ‘First, do no harm,’ would be as good a place to start as any.
I doubt that’s in Malleus Maleficorum, Rob, which has recently been re-translated and reissued, incidentally.
However, I did say to you on the other thread that if you wanted to comment about the politics behind the denial of AGW or, for that matter, the political confrontation between those folks and those who accept it’s a matter of urgency, then that’s fine. But I am just *not* going to entertain another discussion of whether or not AGW exists. So please take that into account.
What a brilliantly written piece Mark. At the end you say: ‘We need to revive our faculties of imagination, in a future anterior mode. That is to say, we need to conceive of the end state we want to see – a juster, fairer and sustainable world order which can accommodate itself to the exigencies of climate change – and work backwards from there. In order to avert the apocalypse.’
There is an ambiguity about justice, fairness and sustainability within capitalism that I don’t think your conclusion draws out. This is because the concepts have both a reformist (and maybe even a conservative) edge and a revolutionary edge. Certainly the task is political but I am unsure ‘secular ecologists’ – perhaps you could explain – are the group to deliver justice, fairness and sustainability. That seems to me to be the task of a major social force in society.
@48 –
That’s precisely what I’d want to avoid, Merc. I think I referred earlier to the idea that a range of different perspectives and interventions at different points could converge as agents of transformational change. That’s what I’d like to see. And yes, ethics is crucial. But it matters more what ethics one adopts – again, that’s where Merleau-Ponty’s work on violence in Humanism and Terror is highly salient – he shows that within the Leninist formation, there was a definite ethic at work. But it’s not the sort of ethics we’d like to see. “Do no harm”, though, is less simple than it sounds. Any response to climate change worth the name, is going to have to harm some interests.
Sorry, Mark. But restore my faith in human nature. Admit you smiled just a little.
Mark – interesting post.
I’m going to put on my devil’s advocate hat for the following comments.
Which historical examples of genuine apocalypses being avoided could serve as a model for the political “imagining” you describe?
Also, much recent scholarship on the end of the Western Empire and the transition to the medieval period emphasises continuity over disruption and indeed shows that the “barbarians” were themselves extremely integrated into Roman culture and administrative practices. The “end” we observe was real, but less cataclysmic than historians traditionally thought. It is also hotly debated as to whether the “end” that did occur was avoidable.
Also, when you draw the analogies with previous apocalypses, you should place more emphasis on the fact that apocalyptic visions and movements have been a part of western culture since at least the rise of Christianity. While the intensification of those visions has been associated with periods of significant social change, many of those forecast “ends” did not take place – and not because there was a political “imagining” that helped avoid it, but because the perceived threat itself was exaggerated.
I’m also not sure that Louis’ reflection is an apt description of how sceptics see the world (and it was Louis XV, not Louis XIV). The quote implies a knowingly unsustainable course of action, not deeply felt scepticism that a course of action is unsustainable.
Finally, do you need to conflate sustainable with just and fairer? If our future is indeed one where non-renwable energy sources have been exhausted, I see know reason to believe to expect it should be any more or less “progressive” than today. There is certainly nothing about renewable energy that presupposes less capitilistic control over their deployment.
@50 – thanks, John!
I’d agree with you that the meanings of justice, fairness and sustainability within capitalism are not satisfactory. One of Marx’ most powerful arguments relates precisely to the understanding of freedom.
My formulation of ‘secular ecologists’ is an adoption of Zizek’s terms, and really just shorthand for a real grouping – the perhaps virtual community of those for whom climate change is a key political struggle. I’m not suggesting such a formation as a subject of historical change in toto. I suspect we’d differ about who that should be, and the degree of unicity such a subject needs (that is to say, if one observes in the future anterior mode, a process of subjectification is observable in retrospect). There’s an issue with universality and particularity lurking around here, as there usually is, and I’d want to contest on several grounds the notion of the proletariat as a universal class. What I think actually gives universality – tendentially – is the weaving together of a multiplicity into a unity, and while there is a cut in the social fabric along class lines, it doesn’t imply that political contestation neatly follows that scission (as Marx already knew).
I’d also refer to what I said above in response to anthony (I think) about the progressive state regimes which rest on the conceptualisation of what is not entirely a class identification but rather a popular one – think of Morales’ appeal, for instance.
Indeed, hence I suggested it as a starting point. As they say, you gotta start somewhere.
Any SF geeks out there familiar with Kim Stanley Robinson’s excellent Mars trilogy? It was published between 1992-1996 and chronicles a future colonisation of Mars. The key plot points in the second and third books hinge on attempts to broker a global climate agreement to manage the terraforming effort. The conference is complete with walkouts and efforts at sabotage. Implacable corporate and governmental interests line up to stymie any attempt to preserve portions of the original Martian environment. The summit ends in acrimonious failure and runaway climatic upheaval ensues.
The guy’s a prophet, honestly.
@53 -
Yes, indeed, LO, though even more recent scholarship, drawing largely on archeological rather than textual sources, is coming to the conclusion that material culture and the standard of living dropped much more markedly than the continuists thought! … and that trade was largely sustained through first Byzantine, then Islamic influence rather than through much of an internal market. The survivals of Roman traditions also appear very patchy – perhaps longest in the South of France, though quite resilient in Italy until Justinian messed it up by reconquering it!
But, I was careful to insert “in retrospect” in the sentence about Odoacer – it’s only from some distance that we can see a break, and those who saw it at the time weren’t necessarily the majority.
Taking that together with your other remarks, I should clarify that I doubt that there are “genuine apocalypses”. That is to say, the end never does come – a world ends, but not the world. Certainly, for those who benefitted from it, the end of the Ancien Regime was the end of *a* world, and events such as the Fronde demonstrate that it had deep cultural roots in some parts of France (which, as is well known, continue to have an effect on the geographical distribution of voting patterns and religious practice to this day), even among those who were manifestly not the elite. The same, if you like, with Rome, according to my argument.
What differs now is precisely the integration of social, economic and ecological factors into one world system. Now, I don’t myself think that “the world” will end. But I think that the miasma of problems we face – all interlinked – does point to an end point for “our world”. If that makes sense!
The other big difference is the fact that this end to a world is ‘natural’ as well as cultural.
As to the last point, sure. But I think that there are limits – including ecological ones – to the processes of reproduction which are intrinsic to capitalism, despite its ability to constantly reinvent itself. And those limits are related to the worldness of the world, if you like. This is probably the topic of another discussion, but I think I’ve written about this from a world systems perspective in the past. Suffice it to say here that I think it is also quite possible that we will end up with a less just and fair economic order than the one we have now. There are certainly worse things than liberal capitalism, but I’m not sure what we’ve got at the moment actually is liberal capitalism.
@55, Merc – it’s not a bad starting point, at all, at all!
Haven’t read Robinson. He’s in the to read list. Perhaps I should bump him up!
@52, Rob, very Pythonesque actually!
My formulation of ’secular ecologists’ is an adoption of Zizek’s terms, and really just shorthand for a real grouping – the perhaps virtual community of those for whom climate change is a key political struggle.
Surely what Zizek is saying (quite correctly, in my view) is that single-issue struggles and New Age crankery are a complete waste of time, and that a new form of ‘communism’ (which he doesn’t define) is what is needed? That ‘real’ politics is about more than the activist qua petitioner, begging permission from the state for this and that?
Mark, do put the Mars trilogy on the high-priority list. It’s excellent holiday reading, not at all taxing. And, fifteen years after publication, eerily, eerily prophetic.
Cheers, Merc! Though I have a feeling my holiday is about to come to and end!
But aren’t you the guy who said “modeling is not science” in another context, when it suited your ideological predilections?
“that is to say, we need to conceive of the end state we want to see – a juster, fairer and sustainable world order which can accommodate itself to the exigencies of climate change – and work backwards from there. In order to avert the apocalypse.”
Nope, don’t really see much historical precedent for that.
If you haven’t seen this Mark, you may like it – ‘A Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema’.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0828154/
Zizek’s take on, guess what, the cinema. It’s hilarious and mesmerising.
Rob @ 28, I’ve come to this late (and I apologise if anyone’s beaten me to it), but if you think Y2K was a bit of millenarian hysteria, you really are a fucking idiot.
Oh, and before you ask for some justification, I’m not going to do your education for you. Go and get a clue.
the perhaps virtual community of those for whom climate change is a key political struggle.
I don’t think it’s particularly virtual, Mark, or at the very least there’s a significant meatspace element. Most of the climate change organisers I know are online and use virtual spaces heavily, sure, but the activists themselves? Very much grounded in the muck. Think 350.org … a virtual collection of very physical actions. 90% of what happened was not online.
My inclination at the moment is to accept the failure to respond, partly in response to people like yourself who seem to know a lot more about the politics than I do. The question then becomes, what do I do? Ignoring political action since it seems ineffective, but also ignoring the apocalyptic “farm in the hills” retreat since I don’t want to live in that world, I’m wondering what the best response is (both personally and “encourage others to do”).
Nobody did. Nobody wanted to. I think you miss the sober, overarching metaphysics here.
@63:
I meant to say something along the lines of this earlier, but Moz put it better.
Mark, the “imaginary” starts with the personal. I think you’ll see more cohesive action begin to take place on the ground, in personal terms, and eventually the political theorising will have to catch up with that…
At least, I hope so.
That looks groovy, fine. On my list!
I think it’s that everyone else thinks it’s an irrelevant side-issue, Rob. Nothing’s changed, though. You’re still an idiot.
“People are noticing things aren’t like the used to be”
I’d like to see evidence (beyond opinion surveys) for this assertion. I would say that there’s a strong tendency for people to like things to be the way they have always been and unless they are confronted by the real in a very immediate way then they will not “really” give a toss.
In my view the only recent event worthy of real analysis with regard to motivating individuals and governments on a grand scale is WW2. The Cold War was a propaganda exercise for most people, any real impacts on real people were isolated in either time or space. WW2 impacted the lives of most continental Europeans as well as those in the UK and the US. Of course millions of non-Europeans were also affected, as usual their travails go undocumented by western historians.
Actually the only things conservatives have on their side is a tendency towards inertia and the fact that AGW affects are slow and dispersed and likely to affect those who can least deal with them first (i.e. not us) and that’s exactly what I reckon will bring on the dystopian future. Blade Runner represents the world on 50 years.
Patrickb, I suspect Blade Runner was a Utopia. It won’t be that good.
David, go and read @ 47, and if you don’t think it’s funny, give yourself up for a bad joke. (And that’s a good one!)
‘Idiot’ and ‘fucking idiot’ are not persuasive terms.
@David – please refrain from insults. It’s in gross breach of the comments policy.
A friend of mine commented on FB just before that this thread was a good interchange. I thought it may not last. I’m sorry to be proved right, and I’d like it to return to where it was. Any further infractions of the comments policy – by anyone – will be dealt with harshly.
“That’s explicit in my post, where I refer to the fact that the discourse of climate change denialism does have a real significance for what happens”
I think you have to give some examples of this discourse. I would hold that if there is one it’s main strength comes from it’s support of the economic status quo and not any internal logic or facts based on empirical research. It is actually full of internal contradictions and unsupported assertions. It is almost incoherent.
Yet it has a great deal of currency, why? This “discourse” often constructs itself as opposed to the prevailing orthodoxy, narrowly defining the field to that of climate change science. However it is actually supportive of the prevailing economic orthodoxy and if you’re looking for a discourse I think you’d start with the Austrian school although I doubt Bolt realises this (Plimer does though).
@63 – moz, thanks for that. I meant ‘virtual community’ in the sense of dispersed collection of individuals and groups, rather than one united movement. I didn’t mean that to be restricted to ‘virtual’ interchanges in the sense of those taking place on the nets, but it may have been a poorly chosen term because it’s come to mean just that!
@61 – thanks, Fine! Seen it, but haven’t read it…
@69 DI(nr)
True, there were flying cars, that’s something to look forward to. Makes eternal twilight a bit more bearable …
@72 – Patrickb, it’s a highly incoherent discourse, because its modus operandi is to switch between several positions (ie “there is no climate change”, “there is climate change but human action has nothing to do with it”, etc), among other reasons. But there is no doubt that its effect is to bolster the position of the polluters. It’s also often articulated to other ideological themes. Take the two (out of four) op/eds in The Australian today taking a denialist perspective. One claimed both that geographical science disproved the fact that climate change is something other than natural oscillation *and* ranted and raved about the virtues of capitalism for the poor. The second took the ‘freedom of speech’ tack, accused scientists of being dominated by political agendas, and talked about the wonders of Enlightenment Rationality, 100% certainty is needed before action, etc.
All this is obfuscation, but generally advances the right’s position in public discourse, and the nature of climate change, as we have discussed before, is that the science is complex and difficult to encapsulate, and is not necessarily easily related by everyone to real or prospective impacts on their lives and the world. Therefore, in respect of public opinion, inserting a wedge of doubt allows people to retreat to a position of complacency.
In other words, because it seeks to intervene at several different points, it can’t be a coherent discourse. Political discourses very rarely are, of course, but they don’t need to be to be effective.
Inverting the author’s meaning of The Role Of The Imaginary I would be interested to know if any Prodder has analysed the stories (ostensibly explanations) supplied by AGW denialists for the domination of the AGW thesis from the perspective of genre.
Since the science supports AGW, the denialists know that attacking the science is useless, so instead imaginitive stories are invented to provide alternative and fanciful ‘explanations’ why AGW has risen to prominence. A recent examples here is the ‘concept capture’ story in which AGW as presented as a Leftist Fascist Pagan One World Government plot abetted by compliant/greedy/frightened climatologists, complete with fuzzy timeline and relevant other creativity.
It seems likely that keepers of the dominant paradigm in groups and societies would have told themselves similar fictions to coccoon themselves from the truth of their impending demise as ideological kings and to create a cast of reprehensibles to blame for their loss of entitlement, privilege, legitimacy, comfortable security and/or ideological certainty as their fool’s paradise unwound.
What is the genre of these stories ? What is their common structure ? Are there any other examples to hand ?
As an example of surprising discoveries in genre, Kurt Vonnegut discovered in his Masters or PHD thesis that the story of Cinderella had the same fundamental structure as many folk creation myths. He wrote about it in his autobiography.
I remember a particularly long strike at Newman. The underlying problem was that the unions had the moral high ground while the company had the legal high ground. So for weeks and weeks the two sides kept standing on their little mound talking past each other instead of really trying to deal with what the other side was really on about.
The climate action debate reminds me of this in many ways. The big difference is that there are lots of little mounds and lots of talking past each other.
There is a group that claims the science high ground and that this science is so frightening that we should collapse the economy of the world as we know it.
There is a group that claims the economic high ground and claims that the economic risks are more important than the environmental risks that are based on questionable science.
There are developing countries that are claiming the social justice high ground on the grounds that the developed countries are trying to lock them into a lower standard of living for the next 40 years.
And so on….
We are not going to get far until we start listening to what others really are saying and try to understand that the real barriers to progress is not human stupidity, political opportunism or questionable science.
It is a good article Mark because it is a challenge to move the debate outside of the narrow limits it has locked into.
I feel it my duty to add a sand grain of balance against the avalanche of false certainty presented by all and sundry posting here, as a service to the real scientists of the world.
Assuming there is a concerted effort on the planet to address carbon emission, in some 50 years or more there may exist actual proof of the theory of human-induced global warming.
Until then it is a theory. Some may choose to present alternative theories – though in the current social climate very few are open-minded enough to consider any alternatives. The desire in some humans to use the theory to create an us-versus-them, believer-versus-unbeliever division in society is, well, simply childish.
Thanks, John. I do think we need to broaden our thinking on this. It’s too easy to get stuck in either a cycle of despair or an overly partisan analysis.
@72
I take your point that as far as the “denialist discourse” is concerned it has power because there’s a lot of it about (in the Oz anyway by the sound of it) which is attributable to it’s intersection with the economic orthodoxy. However outside of this it has no strength because it has no structure.
My point is that until there is a real effect upon the prevailing economic order “denialist discourse” will continue despite it’s inability to withstand rational analysis. That being the case working backwards from a just and fair end state would seem somewhat futile as that is not within the discourse of free market economics.
Current laws that restrict industrial emissions were framed in the political and economic climate (excuse the pun) of the 1960s and 1970s and I would maintain that there has been a substantial change in that climate. Governments in those days, particularly in the US, were far more command orientated with regard to the economy and markets. Recent events with regard to the GFC may yet bring about a change in the economic order (pigs arse). However if you believe Polanyi the game may not be worth the candle.
@80
I assume you’re familiar with the work of Propp?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp
This seems a reasonable enough assertion. One of the biggest difficulties comes precisely because it is a political task – a global, transnational one. And political tasks on a transnational scale haven’t got a very good track record. Building agreement on what “a juster, fairer and sustainable world order” would be like is hard enough – getting agreement on how to get there from here even harder (particularly given the time constraints of the climate change threat), not least because it would have to involve a realignment of economic power amongst nations.
Getting people and politics to see beyond the nation is a challenge – perhaps it fits with the Roman Empire analogy used. Things fell apart (at least in part) because there was an inability for those in power and influence to look outside their immediate sphere and consider the requirements of those outside of it as part of the whole picture.
Thank you Mark for the timely topic and thoughtful essay.
The evocation of the apocalyptic scenario and political or financial agenda behind it is no surprise in context with the AGW. For contemporary western thinking is steeped in the Judeo-Christian myths and imperial roman legacy of state and progress. Where as the behaviour of self deception in view of a threat, which Ayers eloquently observed, is probably an deeper trait acquired in human evolution. it may quite likely serves as some population control purpose and refinement of the species, as in the survival of the fittest.
In my view the comparison with the fall of the Roman Empire is is somewhat misplaced, as the context surrounding the event, as much as it can be framed as an event, is not comparable with the situation we, contemporary global civilisation, are facing today. No doubt certain parallels exist in both civilisations, the technocratic approch to create the desired progress, the reliance on conquest, trading and finance to create wealth and so forth. However, I would argue that in scale and in complexity these two civilisation differ quite distinctly and hence the respective destiny will very likely differ. Thus, Žižeks three transformation processes are much more pronounced in the contemporary civilisation than the Roman one. The ecological breakdown is not just powered by ever increasing resource demand thruogh industrialisation and related pollution, but by near exponential growth of population on a global scale. A human population that does everything, bar defecating, by gadgets, is factory feed and entertained, factory wise housed and transported, factory wise kept healthy and increasingly bread. Essentially we have overextending ourselfs, to the extent that a single individual would not be able to survive just by him or herself long enough to pass the human torch on to a new generation without any modern technological and industrial ‘aids’. These aids have recently received the ultimate upgrade when being digitised. With it gained the the blessing and curse of complexity which pervades now every possible aspect of live in chaotic tangle of information revealing incredible new possibilities and fraught with potential cascading system failures. If people like Greg ridicule the effort thousand of systems analyst, who ensured that medical, banking, transport equipment et al is not going to fail in the millennial date change, they just reveal their absolute ignorance of the complex and precarious foundation our contemporary civilisation is based.
Historically speaking, I see the social changes ahead of us more akin to the Bronze Age collapse and Mayan systematic ecological collapse rather than a apocalypse. As I mentioned on the prvious thread, the Bronze age collapse bruoght on a culture of isolated villages and the Mayan legacy left us with fascinating monumental ruins and relics as well as a dooms day calendar. Yes the world as we know it will end, as it has several times in the human epoch. My ‘dreaming’ of the future is nourished by hope as illustrated in ‘Hero of a thousand Faces’ of ancient myths as collected by Joseph Campbells. I never forget seeing documentary footage of Russian young men pouring concrete onto the failed Chernobyl Reactor to contain the radiation, knowing full well that their mortal life will be very short, but the bravery of their sacrifice will be legendary.
Sorry Greg, above should read “If people like Rob ridicule the effort thousand of systems analyst…”
@83 – Patrickb, as I said in the post, I don’t expect the denialist discourse to persist for all that long. There are any number of points at which it will be corroded by its confrontation with reality. It’s symptomatic of the broader questions, as I suggested, rather than the face of the enemy itself. It functions as a screen for the real denialism – the corporate/nationalist game that has become the politics of climate change to great degree at the level of states.
I should clarify that my call for conceptualising a just and sustainable order is not a task I expect governing elites to fulfill. It’s a task for us. That’s also sort of a brief reply to Andrew Bartlett @ 85. It’s not that the concertation of state action is not a necessary aspect of climate change amelioration, but that it is not a sufficient one, in the absence of pressure from below, which is action taken in light of a desired end state. But I agree with Andrew’s twist on my Roman Empire analogy.
Thanks Mark – yes, I figured it would be about a lot more than governments (some of which are still susceptible to feeling the need to try to appear to do some things along the lines of what their citizens want done). And a “political task” involves a whole lot more than politicians, political parties, elections, etc.
But I still feel rather pessimistic about the prospects of achieving the sort of transnational (and trans-cultural) visioning that would be needed, let alone how to practically implement the ‘how we get there’ stuff. (I’m finding the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ part a bit easier than the ‘optimism of the will’ part, just as the moment)
@86 – Ootz, thanks. As I was saying @ 59, I accept that the Roman analogy isn’t exact. Recent archaeological evidence is demonstrating that the Imperial society and economy were more complex than was often thought, and that old beliefs that technological progress didn’t take place on any scale are over-stated. Having said that, I agree with you that we live in a much more complex world, and I’d add the point I made in my previous comment that ‘nature’ is now as much at issue as culture. That’s where the example of nuclear weapons, used early on the thread, is also a good one. Our whole survival as a world society is much more prone to catastrophic and unintended events – biological ones can be imagined as well – than previous worlds were.
I can’t say I’ve ever studied the Mayans – what you say about a ‘systematic ecological collapse’ is intriguing. Could you perhaps expand?
@59, THR:
Yes.
I’d just make two points.
(1) As I’ve said a number of times, I find aspects of Zizek’s analysis compelling and useful, but not his ‘communist hypothesis’;
(2) For related reasons, he’s often contradictory in his politics. The working class as a universal subject doesn’t exist, because such a subject position is impossible. But the new lumpenproletariats (which include slum dwellers and knowledge workers) may have access to the universal. Etc. There is, of course, his Leninist logic at work, or rather his version thereof. A recurrent drum beat is the implication that state power could be seized, but then that seems to be nothing but assertion, and simultaneously he’s critical of some of the presumptions others make (ie Negri, Hardt & Negri) which then appear to be the same assumptions he needs to support some of his statements. I could go on, and perhaps he’s consistent in terms of his own Hegelian-Lacanian thought, but as a set of practical political prescriptions, it’s at best suggestive. There’s some sort of performative move at work in his writing, I think.
But any form of Leninism certainly isn’t for me.
@90 –
Understandably, Andrew, in light of what’s recently happened (or not happened)!
I think there is a need to reflect on the hopes invested in Copenhagen, and that whole process. Any path to a sustainable world will involve setbacks, perhaps huge ones, and that needs to be understood, and dealt with. That’s a challenge for all of us, I think.
To get an idea of what Ootz is talking about, you should read “Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed” by Jared Diamond. It basically documents the societies that have collapsed under the weight of unsustainable practices.
Of course, don’t take my saying that for implying agreement with Ootz’s dystopian world view!
If this
“An apocalypse, properly understood, is a mode of veiling and unveiling a truth”
is true, then we would have to see the very recent events as being an “economic apocalypse”, and a very close parallel to the Roman scenario. More than that, though, the global finacial crisis has been a trial mobilisation run for the type of cooperation required to engage the Global Warming challenge. Amoung the differences between an economic meltdown and an environmental catastrophy are the speed of events and the human consequences.
Sorry about the upthread snark, Mark. I get as irritated by Y2K deniers as by AGW deniers. Both sets of people seem to cultivate a similar level of wilful ignorance. I suspect, however, that Rob dropped it in there to annoy.
Mark @ 91,
On the Mayans I’d suggest seeing Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto movie too. There’s a few things in there to be taken out of it.
The problem with comparing our current situation with historical precedents is that looking back rarely seems to prepare for the future. There will always be sufficient differences in the situation, past to future, to cast doubt for the validity of the comparison. I prefer to view the problem by identifying the source of our failure to act in the face of potential disaster.
There are a few key flaws in the human condition that drive our failure to resolve situations of the type that we are facing. The first is that the modern human seeks stability, and where we achieve it we seek to maintain it. We each of us create our own aura of comfort, both work and home, and settle in, and the maintenance of that comfort occupies all of our time, energies and resources. Because we apply all of our efforts to maintaining our local comfort, we, in our western specialised living style, do not individually apply time to our global comfort. This we all believe is the domain of other people for whom this is their specialised occupation. Breaking out of our comfort zone requires upheaval. The other flaw in our human condition is that we are not good at recognising incremental change. Rather than react to incremental change we adapt, this is usually a successful survival mechanism.
So the outcome of these forces is that where the buildup to a climate threat is gradual our preference is to progressively adapt, simply because we are unable to recognise that there is change, and because our predisposition is to maintain our comfort. Our modern civilisation, being one of specialisations, further disables survival instincts because we fully trust that, where there is a problem, there is a specialist to engage and solve it.
The main difference between the Roman situation and ours is that the Romans outstretched their mangagement resources, the empire grew larger than their ability to control it. Our Global Warming situation is not one of resources, or mangagement, it is one of recognising that we have a problem, firstly, and then defeating our inbuilt reluctance to change. To pass the boundary between reluctance and action we must defeat the demons of denial, indecision, laziness, and uncertainty. We as a civilisation are only part way through that process.
Terrific post Mark. As we watch our political elites manifestly fail to address climate change even within the restrictions of late liberal democracies, it is critical that we, the people, begin to discuss and imagine other possibilities.
Jane Jacobs wrote Dark Ages Ahead toward the end of her long life in 2004, and like some of the essays in Rebecca Solnit’s Storming the Gates of Paradise from 2007, it examines the likely consequence of our banishments of imagining political alternatives – be it dealing with existing inequities, climate change, resource depletion.
Solnit published Paradise Built in Hell last year, where she chronicles the spontaneous blossoming of collectivism & co-operativism in the apocalyptic moments of disaster. Structures aren’t offered nor defined, but the potential, both expressed and imagined do fleetingly arise. If nothing else, the book reminds us that humans more often than not, respond to crisis in a manner that the right would deny is possible or thinkable (both as a consequence of its potential dimming of their power and an inherent philo-emotional mindset that insists on verticality in social and political structures).
I’m a touch uncomfortable with the death wish notion – Monbiot wrote a post a couple of months ago (presumably after reading Zizak…) saying much the same as to the base motivation for the CC deniers. Pathologising denial runs the risk of undermining how we might respond and construct alternatives. Denial can be more simply seen to be motivated by Greed, Fear and Guilt – motivations that are more straightforward in their revelation, expression and our socio-political responses.
Monbiot’s piece from yesterday is particularly salient:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/01/04/consumer-hell/
“motivated by Greed, Fear and Guilt”….That is a nice clutch there, Bernice. But as Brian pointed out elsewhere regular business has embraced Global Warming Action, it is macro business or “old money business” that is blocking the path forward. It is this business sector that carries political influence. It is a pecking order thing, how can someone on $330 thousand pa deny a person on $10 million pa or higher?
Just a wee point, if you’re going to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (which I also recommend), don’t read anything else he’s written. Strictly a one trick pony that bloke.
*sigh*
While much of the subject matter here is interesting, and i have more than a little sympathy for the author’s intent, I take exception to the suggestion that it is well written.
Much of this dense verbiage is grammatically poor. I had to read the first sentence three times to be sure of its meaning. It is disturbing to hear people of the ilk of John Passant, whom I generally admire, applauding this poorly written tosh. Much of this epistle could have been said in about a third of the word length and be accessible to a much wider audience. This is important in public intellectualism, doncherknow.
Very little of this essay actually addresses how the arguments, if they can be considered such, of those who reject climate change can be countered. Nor does it advance how do we counter the sophistry used by those who peddle this belief to an increasingly wider audience.
Imagination. or wishing it away, don’t feed the ‘orses. Seeing futurism as some kind of a solution (It’s 2010! Where’s my jet-pack?!!) is almost worse than useless. What we do need is demonstrable facts. Facts, mind you, not opinion.
I’m terribly sorry, but as a contribution to dealing with the very real threat posed by climate change denialists, this piece is little more than an intellectual p*ssing contest.
Vanity in the face of populist anti-intellectualism won’t help our grandchildren I’m afraid.
I thought the “nice clutch” quite biblical – seven deadly sins and all that – hyperbole has its place…
But as to:
“But as Brian pointed out elsewhere regular business has embraced Global Warming Action, it is macro business or “old money business” that is blocking the path forward.”
I’d argue that the GWA response of all forms and components of our economies are not at all about changing political structures, rather identifying and privileging new business models – new clothes for the emperors.
This Monbiot (hat tip to Bernice) quote is well worth mulling over
“Most importantly, no deduction is made to account for the depreciation of natural capital: the overuse or degradation of soil, water, forests, fisheries and the atmosphere. Dasgupta shows that the total wealth of a nation can decline even as its GDP is growing. In Pakistan, for example, his rough figures suggest that while GDP per capita grew by an average of 2.2% a year between 1970 and 2000, total wealth declined by 1.4%. Amazingly, there are still no official figures which seek to show trends in the actual wealth of nations”
This could well be relevent to “tower of hope/vale of tears”, as well.
BTW, has anyone actually done a emud-map of the climate change denialists in Australia? Who they are? Who they are associated with? The different formal/informal organisations/associations and factions? What strategies they are using, membership, etc?
Now that would be an interesting sociological study.
BilB, that is a very useful contribution.
The only point I would take is that we as a civilisation haven’t even begun the process, let alone can be considered part of the way through it.
As a community, for example, we are still subsidising V8 Supercar events and planning to build more coal fired power stations. At a policy level, at least in NSW, it is as if climate change isn’t real (certainly as far as the NSW Treasury is concerned) and what policies that are in place are merely window dressing for electoral effect.
Given that Rudd’s CPRS would have seen total emissions actually increase, along with compensation for polluters to continue their practices in a business-as-usual fashion, I believe the same can be said for the Federal government as well.
The Marxists have noted this for some timne now:
“For Marx, capitalism’s robbing of nature could be seen concretely in its creation of a rift in the human-earth metabolism, whereby the reproduction of natural conditions was undermined. He defined the labor process in ecological terms as the “metabolic interaction” between human beings and nature. With the development of industrial agriculture under capitalism, a rift was generated in the nature-given metabolism between human beings and the earth. The shipment of food and fiber hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of miles to the cities meant the removal of soil nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, which ended up contributing to the pollution of the cities, while the soil itself was robbed of its “constituent elements.” This created a rupture in “the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil,” requiring the “systematic restoration” of this metabolism. Yet, even though this had been demonstrated with the full force of natural science (for example, in Justus von Liebig’s chemistry), the rational application of scientific principles in this area was impossible for capitalism. Consequently, capitalist production simultaneously undermined “the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.”
see JB Foster:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/100101foster.php
To be fair, anthony @ 105, the nominally Marxist countries haven’t done any better at keeping nutrients in the soil than the Capitalist countries.
@94 and 97 – thanks, LO and Jacques.
@98 –
BilB, I think the Romans had the latter problem, too.
@99 –
Bernice, Zizek is using the concept of the death drive, not the death wish, in its Freudian/Lacanian sense (ie Thanatos as opposed to Eros). It’s not equivalent in meaning to a desire to die.
@96 – No probs, David. Some comments are indeed designed to provoke.
The intellectual basis for this thread is fundamentally flawed.
The evocation of Zizek and Lacan, both of whom are Catholics, is designed to appeal to confused left-wing Catholics, by making what should be an environmental issue a religious issue.
Talking about ecological collapse as “apocalyptic” panders to religious thinking, and gives succour to those deniers who claim that the environmental movement is a type of pagan religious movement.
The most effective solution to the problem of carbon emissions is to stop having kids, but being religious, and especially being a Catholic, makes any talk of population control anathema.
Zizek isn’t a Catholic, silkworm. He’s an atheist. I have no idea about Lacan. The premise of your comment is non-existent.
In addition, I’ve made it perfectly clear in comments (and the post) that apocalyptic can be employed as a cultural category for understanding particular socio-political modes of experiencing time. There’s nothing further from my mind than appealling to left wing Catholics on this thread, though I dare say that all people of good will who want to do constructive stuff to combat the impacts of climate change should be welcomed. It’s an issue that affects *all* of humanity.
I googled “Zizek Catholic” and I hit the jackpot. Zizek describes himself as a “Christian atheist,” whatever that is. Lacan is mentioned in those threads as a Catholic.
You don’t take criticism very well, do you? How about addressing the substance of my complaint. Start with the issue of apocalypticism pandering to religious thinking, and then move on to the issue of population control.
How does that show Zizek is a Catholic and why does it matter?
Latest BOM figures show 2009 is the second hottest year ever recorded.
http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/climate/change/20100105.shtml
But the problem is that the denialists will spin in this in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. People will expend large amounts of time and energy trying to show them the error of their ways. But it will be pointless, because there is something absolutely pathological about them. Maybe it’s the death drive. Maybe fear and guilt. But how can we possibly change this pathology?
Indeed, Fine.
For the record, he says explicitly in his book with John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, that he sees Protestantism as the logical end point of Christianity. This is all related to his reading of Hegel. In fact, his position as a “Christian atheist” is really about retrieving what he sees as valuable aspects of spirit and community for his “communist hypothesis”. Again, that’s set out explicitly in The Fragile Absolute.
So he is not a Catholic. Sometimes it takes more than Google to understand something.
Nothing I have ever read about Lacan indicates that his religious views had any influence whatever on his thought.
This is just silly.
According to Wiki Lacan was a Catholic but became disenchanted. It led to a falling out with his parents apparently. And although the apocalyptic may be thought about in a secular sense it is embedded in Eschatology and I think S.Worm has a valid point in flagging the possibility of feeding opponents of AGW science be introducing a term historically linked to religion and theology, particularly of the Christian variety.
Actually that’s probably why it (the apocalypse) is less of a motivating force than it once was. We’re all largely over the whole “vengeful god” thing. A rational apocalypse is probably much more insidious, is that a contradiction in terms?
As I’ve commented earlier, apocalyptic is older than Christianity, and not limited to Christianity, Patrick. I’m employing it for particular reasons, which I’ve explained, and I don’t intend to go over that ground again.
I don’t see how an apocalyptic view of climate change, Catholic or otherwise, makes the idea that the planet might be killing itself because of human eactivity altering the atmospheric science and causing a suicidal green-house effect any less relevant. For quite some time now, ever since his comments on World Youth Day, I have held the view that one of the reasons Cardinal George Pell is a climate change sceptic (at least that’s the impression he gives – hope I’m not representing him) is because he believes what’s happening to the world is a God-appointed Apocalypse. The truth of that possible belief is irrelevant. The fact is, Pell seems to believe it, in my book.
As my medieval studies teacher used to say, whether you believe in God or not is irrelevant. What is relevant is that the medievals believed in him. which brings me to an aspect of apocalyptic belief others have commented on. Fear of a changing universe (eg Cohns millenium, though I don’t think Cohn’s a good example as his historical practice is sloppy; or the apolcalyptic beliefs of the sects in the English Civil War period; or the Taiping Revolution in Manchu China) tends to bring people together communally, to act in a socialistic way which goes against the individualist ethos of modern day ultra-conservatism.
I’ve come to this thread quite late, partly because I tend to avoid Climate Change discussions as they only prove how helpless we the common people are – a characteristic of groups facing the apocalypse btw, though not the only one.
For some reason the consequences of the 14th century Black Death in Europe come to mind when I look at a climate changing or post-climate changing world.
not misrepresenting Pell. Please forgive typos in above. Don’t see keyboard very well.
@119.
I’m afraid that I don’t grasp your reasons for employing the notion of the apocalypse very well. You seem to want to use it as a driver for the deployment of the “imaginary” so as to carry out some sort of reverse engineering of a policy for action from a defined goal.
With respect the idea that contemporary humanity will be “confronted with a genuine prospect of catastrophic transformation” is unlikely and thus the apocalypse is unable to attach itself to any concrete meaning. (As an aside I was appalled by the Bruckheimer style short film shown a Copenhagen, talk about over-filling the signfier)
If AGW is to be a “catastrophic transformation” it will be long run and piecemeal, it will not be a black death, a WW2 or a boxing day tsunami.
Paul and Mark, there is a point why the apocalyptic label and its relationship with the judeo-Christian world view is relevant.
The judeo christian world view goes back to the evolutionary psychological event of when monotheism first appeared as a believe system. We can pretty much trace that back to Akhenaten 1300 BC or there abouts. Previously there were mainly pantheistic and paganism world views. What is relevant and peculiar about monotheism world view is it brought with it the concept of individualism and quite literally, overtime changed the perception of the self. Hence, it brought into existence the tension between the individual and the social. Further, with individualism the emphasis of birth and death became more pronounced and brought with it a teleological bias towards time and productivity. In simple terms, progress became linear from bust to boom. My argument is, that even atheist have thesame view of self and progress as christians. I’ll give you an example in context with ecology, where I remember, we automatically assume a peak or climax in succession. Most people actually have difficulties with the concept of a forever evolving ecosystem with stable states punctuated with changes and no climax! Further, cultural psychology has clearly established that indigenous cultures have quite a different perception of themselves. This too was brought out in the inquiry into suicide in custody, as the removal of an individual from the ‘mob’ is quite a traumatic experience. Further, in relation to progress, I would argue that cultures with a non monotheistic background perceive value and progress within them self and their civilisation distinctly different to us. Therfor, my main point is, AGW skeptic accusing AGW proponents of being apocalyptic, have exactly the same world view which puts her/himself or god into the center of the argument and aims to protect and ensure the path of progress to that ultimate climatic peak, paradise or perhaps what the Americans often refer to as being free, or freedom to do what ever one wants to do.
Second, I think it would be helpful to define what is implied in the word apocalypse. I presume it is generally implied as to the ending of civilisation as we know. In this context I recommend to read the introduction chapter of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s ‘Civilization’. He provides us with an excellent overview of past and present definitions and then along the lines of my argument above departs from the usual ranking in terms of progress from the past to the present. He makes several salient points such as below
“In medieval Mexico or Java or Copper Age south-east Europe there were people who preferredto live in relatively small communities and dwellings built of modest materials; but this did not stop them from compiling fabulous wealth, creating wonderfulart, keeping- in most cases-written records (or something very like them)…”.
So my view is not necessarily distopic as Lefty commented to my previous posting or back to the cave as others have commented previously, because to me progress is not linear. To paraphrase the Hundertwasser quote on progress that I posted in the Saturday thread
“To go forward does not equal progress, and a step back does not mean not progressing”.
David Irving @109: of course. Lake Baikal, once the largest inland sea in the world, now a toxic puddle due to hubristic soviet engineering. I wouldn’t want to trawl through the history of actually existing socialism and why and how it failed but nevertheless think that critical, ecologically informed Marxism has a lot to offer especially around the idea of the metabolic relationship between the human social and what I know view as socialised nature.
As to apocalypticism, chiliasm or millenialism if you prefer – what ever motivates activism is OK by me. Arne Naess termed the battle to preserve a functioning nature “the long front”. Strategic alliances, common front and united front politics will all be necessary.
Indeed, anthony. Reflecting further on silkworm’s intervention, I see no reason whatever why alliances shouldn’t be built with Christians (Catholic or otherwise) who want to take action on climate change. Note that I did characterise the position I was adopting as that of a ‘secular ecologist’, and Patrickb, I might leave further justification of what I mean precisely by employing the notion of apocalyptic as an analytical category for a subsequent post.
As Andrew Bartlett alluded to, one of the biggest challenges is that of coordination and concertation between many disparate groups and individuals on a global scale. It seems to me that silkworm’s apparent desire for an anti-Catholic witch hunt isn’t helpful here. Anyone who’s been involved in issues activism for any length of time knows that you have to make common cause on some issues with others whose views on other matters you may disagree with. Again, it’s called politics, not the creation of some sort of space of ideological purity. People are welcome, of course, to do that if they want, but it doesn’t have any useful effect.
I look forward to your elaboration of the apocalyptic as hermeneutic . BTW I reread the larvae of Bombyx mori’s post and it does seem a bit hard on Catholics in particular. I still have sympathy for the idea that the term in question has considerable religious significance and may encourage further infantile behaviour from AGW action opponents (and it doesn’t take much encouragement).
I see that point, Patrickb, but I don’t think they need much excuse to froth at the mouth, and I don’t want to have to self-censor what I have to say lest they distort it. If they’re going to do that, their general m.o. suggests that it doesn’t much matter what you intend cf – the claims made by Bolt etc. that Tim Flannery “doesn’t believe in warming”. I think his response that he didn’t intend to change his style of talking and writing in the face of their nonsense was spot on.
@80
Thanks for your uncommonly perceptive post.
The genre of the ‘explanations’ provided by AGW denialists to explain the dominance of pro-AGW viewpoints in Climate Science is myth.
As this extract from ‘Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts’ by Rapport and Overing explains, the function of myth is not necessarily to convey metaphysical truth, but often to
So, while the content of the myth may be ‘irrational and untrue’, even though related to some social reality the purpose of the myth and its symbols serve to maintain a given social order. The myth lately presented in these pages by AGW denialists – i.e. that AGW is the product of a Leftist, Fascist neo-pagan plot in conjunction with greedy, fraudulent and/or frightened Climatologists – is a superb example of such myth making.
No doubt you will find similar myths with a bracing Google.
Keep up the good work!
That link:
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=9QyPRcimHNQC&pg=PT288&lpg=PT288&dq=the+function+of+myth+reinforce+status+privilege&source=bl&ots=a6eMvRhq-0&sig=HKLg771YxNQNs6rvXsBVS46EU0w&hl=en&ei=aHNCS9bbDIH66QPUlLBD&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CA8Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=the%20function%20of%20myth%20reinforce%20status%20privilege&f=true.
Commit it to memory.
The environment movement as fascist. Yeah right. Bernie Eccleston and Max Mosley.
Yo Marky Mark,
My homie (and the world’s most entertaining futurist) Bruce Sterling just linked to this post. http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/01/four-modes-of-gothic-dissimulation-and-a-will-to-ignorance/
For the likes of Methuselah who want a short sharp teleological summary, I’d say the debate starts with the right decrying as evil even considering policies of lower growth (still growth though) that could lead to us not getting richer as fast as we did while the left also thinks it’s evil that pursuing social equality could or should incur any economic costs at all.
Let’s face it, all the anarcho-syndical-techno-libertarian-capitalist-socialist ideologies/schemes/plans and dreams won’t change the fact we ain’t leaving this planet en masse any time soon. So it behooves us (as the Bible said) to be stewards of our ancestral world.
The Earth is a lady. Time to treat her to a little loving bioeconomy shit. Cheap caviar (a high protein health food) for all from GM dwarf sturgeon in first world favela fish farms is a win-win situation.
Yeah Bruce, your “Green Days In Brunei” is not the worst doable future I’ve read about.In fact doesn’t everyone want a decent diet and an open ended future for their kids and then somewhere warm to retire to afterwards?
Or to put nother way, do you really think that the geologically compressed ocean floor sludge of the excesses of the finance sector is gonna turn into any kinda useful fuel for the future?
The Naughties. The decade when financial speculation and true capitalism finally parted ways.
Sterling’s “Green Days In Brunei” is well worth reading, even despite the fact it’s quite relevant to this post. It ends with a Canadian-Chinese hacker sailing into the sunrise on a hi-tech monster catamaran with an Indochine princess and a few million of inherited dirty money. I’d be happy with that scenario. Especially the hi-tech monster catamaran bit.
Speaking of which, I just visited this in Hobart.
A very sweet boat, drawing only a couple of metres but very seaworthy for all that, and boy will it fuck with the heads of Japanese animism-influenced crew on long dull factory ship voyages when it suddenly emerges out of Southern Ocean mists, playing Hendrix’s version of “Hey Joe” through its built-in loudspeakers.
Which is not to say I don’t like my sushi and patagonian monkfish but I’d happily pay extra for it being won in great pysche-out sea battles.
Oh fuck it, just bollixed up my link in the last post. Read this instead.
“Speaking of which, I just visited this in Hobart.”
Buggeration! Just go here.
http://www.gizmag.com/ady-gil-earthrace-trimaran-whaling/13443/
As logical and or rational creatures it seems difficult to understand why such obvious problems are not dealt with. I can easily recall previous disaster scenarios including but not limited to the nuclear apocalypse, the end of oil (circa the 70′s) germ warfare and the collapse of capitalism. None of these things eventuated and while arguably we have come even closer to a possible ecological collapse which threatens the survival of us and a few million other species on the planet there remains the thorny issue of why things continue to get worse for most of us and why is the world racing headlong into extinction.
A few here have identified population growth as the culprit which is a reasonable assertion but I think blaming population growth ignores the question of equity and distribution. If the world population lived more modestly with a more uniform distribution of material resources then we might not be consuming 3 or 4 planets worth of stuff just to live. But beyond that is the question of motivation. Frankly all of the theoretical talk about what social policies can be developed and what strategies might be deployed ignores the position of rich vested interests who apparently will simply acquiesce to any plan that reduces their wealth and influence despite the obvious observation that such vested interests have acquired their wealth and influence either through a long family tradition of protecting their positions or by ruthlessly exploiting the capitalist system and their fellow human beings.
Not only do such vested interests dominate the use of resources but they have also secured state support both financial and coercive. Laws protecting private property and taxes devoted to protecting corporate interests are just two examples. It seems pointless then to contemplate what political action can take place when the institutions of state are already corrupted and serve the vested elite. It seems equally obvious that in the event of cataclysmic apocalypse the vast majority of the worlds population will simply be ill-equipped to defend their interests against those that have significant coercive and violent resources since it is not just everyday consumer-able resources that the elite have been hoarding.
It seems difficult to engage with debates about our apparent demise since such debates can easily fall into the category of political distraction, meanwhile the wheels keep turning and as they say, the rich get richer and the poor get more numerous. And it should be observed that while capitalism as a thing of relationships and behaviour is in itself devoid of principal architects it is certainly not devoid of a small number beneficiaries and their supporters who have no interest whatsoever in breaking the system.
Please check out this reference which confirms Zizek’s prognosis.
http://www.beezone.com/AdiDa/reality-humanity.html
Plus further essays from the same book.
http://www.dabase.org/not2.htm
“None of these things [have] eventuated” yet
true
Nab!133: ‘A very sweet boat, drawing only a couple of metres but very seaworthy for all that’…
Not any more:
http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/201001/r495041_2586202.asx
A bit off thread: The power of Rome was based on it’s military might – Then they outsourced their defense to a friendly Goth – Who then took over,
The power of the US was based on its technical and manufacturing strength – Then they outsourced it to the……………….Watch this space.
Danny @140, nice video. Special meaning of nice.
I take it that the Japanese then did the humanitarian responsible thing, and stopped to help the stricken boat? Since it was an accident and all?
That was no accident, the Japanese ship clearly swerved (IMO) towards the Ady Gil. They probably imagined to do less damage to bring the other ship seen in the near distance to the Ady Gil’s aid, effectively disabling both.
Alternet names the 15 worst filth merchant liars. Informative and a lot of fun including the over the top fantasy punishments.
15 Most Heinous Filth Merchant Liars
PatrickB @ 126 “I look forward to your elaboration of the apocalyptic as hermeneutic.”
Yeah, you could do worse then applying some ‘Truth and Method’ to this complex subject. Quite frankly, in view of the current debate a deeper analysis of the attitude and ethics of AGW deniers would not go astray. Combined with Methusalahs (@106)emud-map of the climate change denialists in Australia it would provide a better understanding of where the apocalyptic claim is coming from, and therefor clearer arguments against such. At the same time it never hurts to be a bit reflexive on our own actions and motivations.
Re Formation of attitudes and ethics towards the environment, first lesson in 101 Environmental Psychology:
Bell, Fisher, Baum & Greene (1996) Environmental Psychology
Thanks Fran for that link with the names the 15 worst filth merchant liars , or what I prefer to term, sick or criminal people. For this purpose the Altnet characterisation, as entertaining as it is, it is not conducive for an accurate profile on which to act upon.
Lets see if an Australian equivalent list exists. If needs to be we may have to come up with it ourselves.
A fascinating thread. As a late baby boomer my historical studies were inspired by Norman Cohn, i am intrigued to read this exemplary scholar is supposed to have become dated. I guess this is supposedly due to literary-postmodern type of narrative analysis. I do not relish reading post modern obscurantist analysis but will if i have to. So could you give some references for me-and others- to follow up more recent important thought on apocalyptic studies? What historical studies have superseded Cohn’s work on middle ages, and what is a good recent guide to current debates?