The Anthropocene and the Rhetoric of “We”.
Global North / Global South
Why is so much writing on the Anthropocene written in the first person plural? So much of it refers to “our” predicament (especially in relation to climate change) and “our” responsibilities moving forward. Who is this “we”?
A shibboleth is a statement or belief that serves as a marker for belonging to a group. The associations of Palestinian / terrorist and Israeli / zioniist are contemporary shibboleths. (Zadie Smith)
How do we imagine the totality of this “we” that is larger than human? It may someday be possible to fill out the “we” of the Anthropocene with concrete identities of humans and nonhumans. Or it may not. (Chakrabarty)
The choice of subject in question, the Anthropos, has been roundly criticized by political and humanistic critics (if one can still use that term in a “post-human” time). The most significant objection to the term is that it seems to erase all distinctions between humans in general and some humans in particular, that it overlooks significant differences between rich and poor — both within societies and between them, between the “global North” and the “Global South”, and it passes over issues of justice and injustice. (see climate justice) (see also Plantationocene)
It seems that by and large, the discourse around the Anthropocene comes from the developed nations and addresses (intentionally or not), the inhabitants of the developed world. It is primarily expressed in English, in conferences and publications posted to the internet. One can argue that the term “anthropogenic” implies that climate change is no one's fault, but everybody's responsibility. Well-meaning liberal thinkers could suggest that a critique along these lines is divisive and may exacerbate “tribal” differences in human societies. (see also identity)
As the environmental historian and Marxist critic Jason W. Moore asks, “Are we really living in the Anthropocene – the ‘age of man’ – with its Eurocentric and techno-determinist vistas?” How can one speak of the Earth, its cycles and life forms, as well as the human species? (see Capitalocene). See also Earth Systems Science). Donna Haraway insists that “No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts, acts alone; assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors make history, the evolutionary kind and the other kinds too.”—Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene”
It may someday be possible to fill out the “we” of a negative universal history of the Anthropocene with concrete identities of humans and nonhumans. Or it may not. (Chakrabarty)
Is a “Them” required for there to be an “Us”?
In Thomas Hobbes’ famous words, life in the state of nature (that is, without government) would be subject to “continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” In this situation where there is no common authority to resolve disputes, we can easily imagine with Hobbes that the state of nature would become a “state of war”, or even worse, a war of “all against all”.
In In its current usage, tribalism in contemporary politics refers to ways that humans band together for their common defense and define themselves as “us” as opposed to “them”. In Thomas Hobbes’ account, they mutually covenant each to the others to obey a common sovereign authority. Such covenants are for the sake of protection and their underlying motivation is fear—whether of one’s fellows or of a conqueror. The political legitimacy of the authority, which Hobbes calls “Leviathan”, depends only on whether it can effectively protect those who have consented to obey it; and political obligation ends when protection ceases.
Hobbes is famous for his early and elaborate development of what has come to be known as “social contract theory”, the method of justifying political principles or arrangements by appeal to the agreement that would be made among suitably situated rational, free, and equal persons. (see John Rawls’ Theory of Justice). He is infamous for having used the social contract method to arrive at the astonishing conclusion that we ought to submit to the authority of an absolute—undivided and unlimited—sovereign power.
In an essay on “the idols of the tribe”,
“Auctoritas non veritas facit legem” (Authority, not truth, makes law). Thomas Hobbes (1668) According to Hobbes, the sovereign is not bound by the law in an emergency or “state of exception.” Do the current prospects of climate change constitute a “climate emergency?” (see climate justice) One of the most commanding themes in contemporary political thought – popular and academic – is the idea that states of emergency are being wielded by powerful actors to advance their own interests at the expense of less-resourced and more vulnerable groups
“A multitude of men, are made one person, when they are by one man, or one person, represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that multitude in particular” (Hobbes, Leviathan, I.16.13). In the center is the figure of the Sovereign King, whose body is both literally and figuratively constituted by the blurring-together individual bodies of the citizenry, the co- signers of the social contract, who face away from the viewer and towards the Sovereign
In the twentieth century, the most famous and controversial successor to Hobbes was Carl Schmitt, (1888–1985) a conservative German legal, constitutional, and political theorist, who joined the nazi party and came to be perceived as the ‘Crown Jurist’ of National Socialism, after 1933
In his most famous work, The Concept of the Political, Schmitt defended the view that all true politics is based on the distinction between friend and foe, and that there can be no functioning legal order without a sovereign authority. (see above) Political groups, according to Schmitt, are ultimately defined by their willingness to fight and die in war. Charles Darwin himself, in “The Descent of Man” insisted that “There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”
Liberal constitutionalists typically hold that all legitimate acts of state must apply general legal norms, (as in the expression ”a nation of laws, not men”), so that people are subject only to the determinate and predictable demands of the law, not to the potentially arbitrary authority of persons. But in order for the law to become effective, Schmitt held that there needs to be an authority that can decide how to apply general legal rules to concrete cases, and how to deal with problems of contested interpretation or under-determination.
In Carl Schmitt’s famous definition of sovereignty, the sovereign is “he who decides on the state of exception”. The state of exception is the paradoxical situation in which the law is legally suspended by a sovereign power in order to safeguard the law against perceived threats. (Agamben) For Agamben, “the voluntary creation of permanent state of emergency…has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones.” Schmitt’s thinking is directly relevant to current issues of populist politics. It shows how democratic ideals can be put to the service of political authoritarianism. The contemporary failures of international negotiations to address Climate Change in a consequential manner, and the attacks on liberal democracy by authoritarian “populists” have made Schmitt’s writings relevant today, even if, In the words of one British historian, “we have to hold our noses” when we think about him. Will the political future be defined by periods of dysfunctional democracy followed by periods of authoritarian rule?
Jim Shaw” “Heap” plastic Leviathan?
In Climate Leviathan, A Political Theory of our Planetary Future, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann forcefully reject the tribalist premise and insist that “Political life does not begin with ‘us’ and ‘them’, friend and enemy.” But is a global Anthropos or some sort of world government possible, necessary, or even a prerequisite for effective action? (especially regarding climate change) Is some form of global enforcement power required to make environmental justice a part of a global policy? (see Climate Justice). While the United Nations and its agencies have moved in that direction, sovereignty still resides in the nation-states, and a choice between dithering democracies and global tyranny is an unappealing one, to say the least.
Us again?
Is a democratic global “we” possible? Can any group identities extend globally? As Isaacs puts it, “The ‘nation’ is the most persistently surviving unit in human political affairs, remaining so in a world that has outgrown its limitations and can no longer afford its drawbacks and dangers”. Would it take a catastrophic reduction in the human population to establish Anthropos as a political subject? Could an eco-socialist alternative work in practice? How could it scale up or down?
In order to forestall a Sixth Great planetary Extinction event, the renowned biologist E.O. Wilson has called for half the Earth to be left unoccupied by humans and be allowed to rewild. (see biodiversity) That figure is the result of calculations derived from the theory of island biogeography, that he developed with his colleague Robert MacArthur in the 1960’s. The two scientists examined the balance of immigration and extinction over time for an island or a bounded area, and found that the number of species in an equilibrium state is, in theory, a function of the size of the island or area.
Larger areas hold more species, and Wilson’s calculations showed that half the earth would be required to sustain the number of species that exist today. Given current rates of habitat destruction and land use change, especially deforestation for the purposes of farming and livestock cultivation, it seems implausible that the half-Earth program could be implemented, especially in the light of the sovereignty issues discussed above. Perhaps it simply serves to highlight the scale of the issue of biodiversity..
Wilson recognizes the destructive dimensions of human influence in the Anthropocene era, especially the potentially catastrophic effects of the “sixth extinction” on but he is critical of what he calls the “new Anthropocene ideology,” and its revisionist approach to conservation. Wilson blames some of the shortfalls of the conservation movement on claims that Earth’s destiny is to be humanized. As an example, he quotes Earle Ellis to the effect that environmentalists should “Stop trying to save the planet. Nature is gone. You are living on a used planet. If this bothers you, get over it. We now live in the Anthropocene—a geological epoch in which Earth’s atmosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere are shaped primarily by human forces.” Wilson’s objections to this argument is based on his extensive studies of the natural world and his humility in the face of the unknown. As he puts it, “The biosphere does not belong to us. We belong to the biosphere”. “We are not as gods,” he writes in response to Stewart Brand’s injunction, “We are as gods and have to get good at it.”
Surprisingly enough, Wilson holds an optimistic view of the evolution of the free market system, and the way it is increasingly shaped by high technology. “Just as natural selection drives organic evolution by competition among genes to produce more copies of themselves per unit cost in the next generation, raising benefit-to-cost of production drives the evolution of the economy.” (Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life) The history of social and economic Darwinism is a problematic one, to say the least, and Wilson seems to accept accounts of capitalistic technology’s benefits. (aside from the horror that geoengineering inspires in him).
While Wilson is loathe to delve into politics as opposed to science. This is not the case of writers like Jason W. Moore, (see Capitalocene), the economist Thomas Piketty, or the authors of Half-Earth Socialism, Troy Vettese and Drew Prendergast, who highlight the dangers of capitalism for the health of the planet.
For Piketty, the only real alternatives to “hypercapitalism”, other than socialism, are authoritarianism, Chinese-style Communism, or “reactionary projects” like ISIS. Unlike proponents of various forms of “green” capitalism, Piketty considers capitalism’s unrelenting and insatiable appetite for “growth” as incompatible with any consideration of “planetary boundaries” indicating the emergence of a new kind of
‘geologic politics’ that is as concerned with the temporal dynamics and changes of
state in Earth systems as it is with more conventional political issues revolving around
territories and nation state boundaries:
But as Vettese and Prendergast put it, “Wilson fails to see that Half-Earth must be socialist if it is ever to exist.”
One dimension of a socialist Earth would be to make the entire planet an object of planning. Such a project would be riven by competing tribal interests. How could competing local, national, and planetary interests be reconciled? Aside from the many sources of opposition to this project, how could socialist planetary planning not take the discredited forms of soviet “top-down” programs?
Both authors speak of Half-Earth Socialism as a way of establishing conditions for human welfare within planetary boundaries. Its goal is to “construct a system of information, accounting, economic indices and stimuli which permit local decision-making organs to evaluate the advantage of their decisions from the point of view of the whole economy.” (Leonid Vitaliyevich Kantorovich, Nobel lecture, 1975).