5 The Rise and Fall of the Super-agent
The decisive act of modernity, according to the philosophical fathers of the age, was that of a man sweeping away the fog of medieval obscurantism to discover the liberatory power of pure reason. With this act, humankind embarked on a historical enterprise in which we could flourish fully for the first time. In his foundational essay of 1784, “What Is Enlightenment?,” Immanuel Kant argued that freedom – freedom to make public use of our reason – arose because humans found the fortitude to seize it and to take the path of self-determination instead of subjecting ourselves to the vagaries of divine salvation. In short, we left our adolescence behind and attained our majority. The history of human freedom, in this narrative, was a fortuitous happening that followed a spontaneous outbreak of intellectual courage on the part of a handful of free thinkers.
If modernity was an era in which humankind had to ground itself afresh and make ourselves subject to our own moral law, the secure place from which we did so was the certainty of our own understanding, that is, Descartes’ inner domain of “clarity and distinctness.” In so doing, we extracted ourselves from the forces surrounding us, not only those of religious superstition but also from an “enchanted” nature, giving rise to a mechanical universe overseen by a distant god. Nature was rendered inert and passive. A dead world was unthinkable in pre-modern times, when “Soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all things,”1 and miners performed propitiatory rituals before digging into the living earth.
How we understand the primordial act of modernity frames how we respond to the event of the Anthropocene, surely one of equal moment to the arrival of modernity or, indeed, of civilization itself. If it was a fortuitous act of self-liberation achieved by the clever animal, animal rationalis, then we owe our liberty to nothing and are free to use it as we please. Our sovereignty makes no demands on us. Yet even as this new view of man emerged, in the shadows another understanding formed, one that now comes into the light with the arrival of the Anthropocene. What if human freedom were not a random epiphenomenon snatched from nature by a few courageous philosophers who fashioned a “realm of freedom” in opposition to the hitherto omnipresent “realm of necessity”? What if freedom belongs to nature-as-a-whole so that, in Friedrich Schelling’s thought, freedom is woven into the fabric of nature?2 Such an idea appeals to those who sense that life and human existence are not mere accidents. It gains empirical force when we no longer think of the Earth as an elaborate mechanism subject only to mathematical laws of cause and effect but as a self-organizing dynamic system characterized by emergent properties in the way contemporary science itself tells us. Emergent properties belong to the system but cannot be found in any individual element of it and evade all cause-and-effect explanations. In such systems – and the Earth System is the mother of them all – the future always evades full predictability and inevitably holds surprises.
Before scientists began to understand self-organizing complex systems and the spontaneous creativity that characterizes them, the fact of creation, including the creation of life, had to be either attributed to divine intervention or somehow crunched into a cause-and-effect mechanism. For the religiously inclined, nature’s spontaneous creativity might be the last redoubt for God, and a pretty good one as it’s immune to the embarrassments that the “God of gaps” had to endure as scientific explanation filled one gap after another. It may also be the source of Attenborough-like wonderment at nature’s extraordinary ingenuity and limitless generative power.
The spontaneity of freedom makes sense within a complex system with emergent properties. It is consistent with the kind of planet that Earth System science is beginning to reveal and explain to us, one capable of naively giving rise to life, and then intelligent life. Such an understanding suggests a resolution of the apparent contradiction between our actual separation from nature and our unshakable dependence on it. If freedom is woven into nature-as-a-whole, then that is only the obverse of the idea of the embedded subject, for whom nature is woven into freedom. This thought provides not only a philosophical basis for the Anthropocene’s melding of the human and the natural, but also opens up space for an ethics that is neither exclusively inter-subjective nor buried in nature, but begins with a subjectivity that can never wrench itself free of its material roots.
Critics of subjectivist philosophies have always sought to overcome them by endeavoring to integrate discursive thought with intuitive or sensual knowledge.3 Yet from where we stand now, the critics were hamstrung because they began on the same subjectivist ground and only attempted to expand forms of knowledge, even if the other kind of knowledge was said to come from somewhere else (the numinous or the noumenon). Now we see that the Kantian categories of subject and object have collapsed. With the arrival of Anthropocene Earth freedom/spontaneity can no longer be allocated to the domain of the subject and necessity is no longer owned by the object/nature.
If the definitive Kantian division of the world between the realm of necessity (nature and its laws) and the realm of freedom (occupied by man) seems to be of philosophical interest only, it is in fact the essence of modernity.4 It is how we, in an unconscious and quotidian way, define ourselves – as isolated egos existing inside bodies distinct from the world around us. However, the “free man” born of modernity now discovers that he is bonded and bounded in a completely new way – no longer simply “dependent on his environment,” instead inhabiting a realm that is not the passive stage on which he can act out his freedom but a world animated, unruly, and irritable. Before the arrival of the Anthropocene, it was possible to believe in the bifurcated Kantian structure of the modern world; since its arrival, the two realms have bled into one another. Freedom is restricted and conditional and must be played out tentatively on a disorderly and reactive Earth. Necessity is unpredictable and intemperate, liable to overreact to the proddings of free beings. This is why the first objective of this book has been to begin the task of reinventing freedom and necessity in the light of our new knowledge of the Earth System.
The work of the “postologists” – especially Bruno Latour, but also Haraway, Tsing, and Isabelle Stengers, among others – succeeded in breaking down the Kantian division, enmeshing the two realms by redistributing agency and exposing the unsustainability of the human monopoly on freedom. What they could not foresee was that, with the arrival of the Anthropocene, deconstructed freedom had to be reconstructed, this time as an anthropos centered around its unprecedented power, an anthropos that gathered so much agency that it came to rival the great forces of nature, only to discover it was a freedom tightly bound by a wild and defiant realm of necessity, with its own “agency” that exceeds ours.
The peril of our times is that human beings have yet to realize that freedom can no longer operate independently of necessity, and so continue to act as Moderns, free to play out their agency on a compliant Earth.
If we acknowledge the Earth System’s emergent properties – its capacity for spontaneous creativity – then the realm of freedom was always a latent possibility within nature. In this free creature, however, the Earth gave birth to a stubborn child who grew to maturity at times convinced he could break all bonds and lord it over the matrix that generated him. Such an understanding (one implicit in the fable I related in the previous chapter) allows for the existence of the particular anthropos of the new anthropocentrism, the powerful world-making creature whose worlds are always circumscribed and immersed in the actuality of the agents’ embodiment, and so their embeddedness in the natural world.
This conception of freedom as woven into nature is both more and less anthropocentric than the Kantian one. It is less because freedom is forever folded into nature and not conjured into existence by bold thinkers using their own brainpower. The possibility of freedom always resided in nature and once manifested must be bound to it, networked into nature. It is more because knowing freedom’s source within nature-as-a-whole comes with a heavy responsibility, to protect and enhance nature, to live within its limits as we make new worlds. In other words, it brings an ethics that begins with our duties to the “object” and only then to other subjects, an ethics that like all others springs from the freedom to choose, but unlike others must be rooted in the realm of necessity. If freedom is woven into nature, then responsibility too is woven into nature.
In the light of this new double crossing from human to nature, from necessity back to freedom, humankind is no longer the anomaly, the freak of nature. We become the key to nature-as-a-whole. Certainly, the injection of human will into the functioning of the Earth System in the Anthropocene becomes more intelligible if freedom is somehow made intelligible in nature-as-a-whole. In that case, our activities in bringing on a new epoch in the geohistory of the planet should not be regarded only as an ethical lapse, with no function in the unfolding of nature-as-a-whole; they tell us something fundamental about the nature of the whole and the arc of its narrative. Yet if humans become the key to nature-as-a-whole it is not in the sense of the mystical traditions, captured in Schopenhauer’s aphorism: “We must learn to understand nature from ourselves, not ourselves from nature.”5 Schopenhauer was restating the first lesson of the “perennial philosophy”: since each being contains within it the essence of the whole world, the All can be found within if one knows how to find it. In such an understanding, the only form of advance is to higher states of consciousness. In the arc of geohistory revealed by the Anthropocene, however, the dynamic belongs to the changing material relationship of free beings with the Earth, and chasing higher states of consciousness becomes a form of avoidance.
If the Anthropocene represents the convergence of human history and geological history, nature-as-a-whole is the domain in which both move so that they can converge. The new epoch forces us to acknowledge the dynamic reciprocity of humankind and Earth, the “synthesis of history and nature,” both of which belong to a totality, a whole that is trans-historical in the sense that all history takes place within it. While Schelling saw this synthesis as “the symbol of eternal unity,”6 in practice it turns out not to be a harmonious marriage between humans and nature but a conjugal war in which neither is able to divorce the other. If nature desired to dissociate itself from humans it would find it had made a creature of great tenacity and resourcefulness. And the only way humans could divorce themselves from nature would be to depart the planet forever, a dream on which I will have more to say.
If anyone wished to challenge the marriage’s existence then the arrival of a new stage in geohistory, blending human will with geological processes, must dispel all doubt. The fact that we are now able to recognize this implicates us and our world-making capability more deeply in the totality. If humans are the “unnatural” creatures by way of a world-making propensity that puts us partly outside the lawfulness of nature, then the totality must encompass the unnatural and the natural as one, even if today a great struggle is taking place between the forces of nature and unruly humans, a struggle in which nature responds with growing irritability.
The Anthropocene brings philosophy back to the sensual world, the world of experience rather than thinking – of world creation on a material foundation, of striving, of neglect and care, of natural limits. It is philosophy immersed in the flux of actual life instead of the abstract rules of the analytical mind. It means the privileging of questions of our being, of our nature, before questions of knowledge. In the philosophies of knowledge nature became subsidiary, allowing, in Bruce Matthews’s words, “an inflation of the cogito that leads to the vainglorious deification of the human subject” at the cost of the “annihilation of nature.”7 It is no wonder that mainstream ethics today, preserved in the formaldehyde of purified subjectivity, has nothing to say about the Anthropocene.
Schelling was perhaps the first to argue, around 1800, that the rise of subjectivism and its split of the thinking subject from nature provide the theoretical justification for the destruction of nature. But that cannot be the whole story. One cannot reject modernity’s actual distancing from nature as such, but only challenge the form it took. In the world come of age, it is not our split from nature that must be overcome, but our violence against it, arising from the conviction that the split was a total severance. It is better to say that the rise of subjectivism opened up the possibility of the actual destruction of nature, but it also opened up resistance to it. Opposition to the depredations of industrialism was present from the outset, and subjectivism as philosophy and as mode of consciousness gave rise to modern politics itself, including a politics that challenges the dominant form of subjectivism. If returning to a pre-modern mode of consciousness is neither possible nor desirable, a new anthropocentrism emanating from the embedded subject is the only way into the future.
So when humankind came of age we had a choice. We could decide how to use our turbocharged agency – the freedom whose capacity for good or ill was multiplied a thousandfold by the liberation of our creativity in the course of the scientific-industrial revolution. More than this, I claim that the coming of age was not an accident, or an event triggered by a few intrepid men, or the inexorable evolution of a process in train for millennia. Our coming of age was the manifestation of the agency latent in nature-as-a-whole, when humans, alone in a disenchanted world from which the gods had withdrawn, were ceded the opportunity to earn the right to “inherit the Earth.” The concentration of agency in humans is not without meaning; freedom with Earth-changing power put us in the position where we had to decide how humans could flourish without destroying the Earth.
Humanity’s creative powers embody the possibility that they be used to enhance the life-enriching potential of the Earth as well as to improve the human condition. Nature therefore contains within it the possibility of mutually harmonious human–Earth enhancement. One might say, speaking teleonomy rather than teleology, that when humankind emerged the Earth was generating a being who could enhance it to reveal its extraordinary possibilities, including the cultivation of the cultural, intellectual, and moral powers of humankind itself, a creature with the potential to become the most sophisticated being, able to reflect on nature and comprehend it in new ways, as well as to transform it.
Human agency is not freedom for freedom’s sake, power for power’s sake, or merely the means to human well-being and material growth. It is much bigger than that, for beyond all purely human-oriented aspirations must be the cultivation of our relationship with the planet to the enduring benefit of both. Indeed, pursuit of the human good, taken in isolation, gives rise to meaninglessness. A conception of the responsible cultivation of the Earth fends off the dragon of nihilism that stalks every society once it attains a moderate level of affluence and peace. For if humans are free to set their own ends and they set ends that are their own, attaining them leaves nothing, other than a yearning for something else. The duty to care for the Earth is the meaningful goal as well as the prudent one. So the question is not only whether freedom will be used to advance the common good of humans (for humanity to set its own ends), but whether those ends will be set to include the protection and enhancement of the life-sustaining capacities of the natural world. In other words, rather than history circling around the question of human advancement, we now discover that all along it was not so much conflict between human beings that put all greater dreams in jeopardy; it was conflict with nature that would prove decisive.
We humans are adept at avoiding responsibility. The proposal to cool the Earth by coating it with a layer of sulphate aerosols to reduce the amount of incoming solar radiation is the technofix to end all technofixes, a grand technological intervention that would side-step the awkward “socio-fixes” demanded by continued emissions of greenhouse gases. Rather than slashing the asset value of some of the globe’s biggest corporations, asking consumers to change their habits, or imposing unpopular taxes on petrol and coal, this form of solar geoengineering carries the implicit promise that it will protect the prevailing politico-economic system, which is why certain conservative American think tanks that for years have attacked climate science as fraudulent have endorsed geoengineering as a promising response to global warming.8 It not only protects the system but vindicates it in the face of criticism from environmentalists, for it would prove that any problem, even one as big as climate change, can be solved by human ingenuity and a can-do attitude. At least, it would if it worked. Doubts that the Earth System would collaborate in any intervention to take control of the climate system and regulate it to suit human needs are well founded in Earth System science.
Solar geoengineering is no fantasy; a fleet of planes packed with sulphates could feasibly be deployed within the next few years. Another kind of grand techno-savior will take several decades. Plans are afoot to escape the ecological mess by fleeing into space. In 2014 we read in The Times:
British scientists and architects are working on plans for a “living spaceship” like an interstellar Noah’s Ark that will launch in 100 years’ time to carry humans away from a dying Earth.9
Known as Project Persephone – curious because in Greek mythology Persephone was the queen of the dead – its website announces that the goal is to build “prototype exovivaria – closed ecosystems inside satellites, to be maintained from Earth telebotically, and democratically governed by a global community.”10 NASA and DARPA, the US Defense Department’s advanced technologies agency, are also developing a “worldship” designed to take a multi-generational community of humans beyond the solar system.
Paul Tillich once noted the intoxicating appeal space travel holds for certain kinds of people. The first space flights became symbols of a new ideal of human existence, “the image of the man who looks down at the earth, not from heaven, but from a cosmic sphere above the earth.”11 If Project Persephone’s avatars dream big, a reader of the Daily Mail brings it down to earth: “Only the ‘elite’ will go. The rest of us will be left to die.”
Perhaps being left to die on the home planet would be a more welcome fate. Imagine being trapped on this “exovivarium,” a self-contained world in which exported nature becomes a tool for human survival, a world where there is no night and day, no seasons, no mountains, streams or oceans, no worms or wedge-tailed eagles, no ice, no storms, no winds, no sky, no Sun, a closed world whose occupants would work to keep alive by simulation the archetypal habits of life on Earth. What kind of person imagines him or herself living in such a world? What kind of being, after some decades, would such a post-terrestrial realm create? What kind of children would be bred there?
According to Project Persephone’s sociologist, Steve Fuller: “If the Earth ends up a no-go zone for human beings due to climate change or nuclear or biological warfare, we have to preserve human civilization.”12 But why would we have to preserve human civilization? What is the value of a civilization if not to raise human beings to a higher level of intellectual sophistication and moral responsibility? What is a civilization worth if it cannot protect the natural conditions that gave birth to it? Those who fly off leaving behind a ruined Earth would carry into space a fallen civilization. As the Earth receded into the all-consuming blackness, those who looked back on it would be the beings who had shirked their most primordial responsibility, beings corroded by nostalgia and survivor guilt.
For those who refuse to shirk responsibility for the Anthropocene, what guidance can we draw from the traditions of justice and ethics? When we step back and survey the epoch-stopping force of anthropogenic climate change and mass extinctions our established ethical categories and legal principles appear banal and feeble. If the human impact has been so powerful that it has deflected the Earth from its natural geological path, describing the state of affairs as “unethical” or “unlawful” seems to be some kind of category error. Penal codes proscribe offenses against property and the person. Some codify crimes against humanity. But where in a statute book would we look for the crime of subverting the laws of nature? What penalty would a court impose for killing off a geological epoch?
If not unlawful, then these acts are surely unethical. Yet to see them, as the dominant ethical theories would have it, as the result of a miscalculation about how to maximize human happiness or a failure to act according to a Kantian golden rule somehow trivializes the magnitude of what has been done. An ethical framework that can tell us whether it is wrong to overstate our travel expenses cannot tell us whether it is wrong to change the Earth’s geological history. The attempt to frame it by mere ethics risks normalizing an event without parallel, of rendering prosaic a transition that is in fact Earth-shattering.
Before we apply existing ethical constructs to the Anthropocene, including the implied moral stance of those who dream of fleeing a dying Earth, we must grapple with the more foundational question thrown up by the new epoch: What kind of creature interfered with the Earth’s functioning and would not desist when the facts become known? What kind of being made the laws and ethical codes and can now make plans to blast off into space or deploy its technological might to subdue the Earth through solar geoengineering? Who are we and what is the nature of our responsibility?
We begin to approach an answer when we understand human freedom as woven into the fabric of nature-as-a-whole, and how that truth was forgotten when we became besotted with our demands for freedoms and power over nature. It is only through a deep, pre-ethical sense of responsibility, lodged in the agent who accepts our collective embeddedness, that humans and nature can live together. This sense cannot belong to the individual or to the citizen of a nation (who is always inclined to shift responsibility to other nations), but to the human who feels the inescapable responsibility that comes with the unique and extraordinary place of humankind on planet Earth. And so, after the death of God, respect for the integrity of the Earth can grow only from the sense of gratitude for the gift of freedom and an acute awareness of its dangers. Such an orientation arises not from obligations to other humans (as in all conventional ethics), which is to say, not from the realm of freedom as such; it arises out of an understanding of freedom emerging from nature-as-a-whole.
For philosophers, evil is always a relation between humans inhabiting an inter-subjective world of their own making and so belongs to the domain of what humans do to each other. From this standpoint, it is because we are not natural that good and evil are possible in the world. Nothing an animal, let alone a force of nature, can do may be described as evil, a truth now commonplace enough but one belonging to a post-Renaissance world. Within an inter-subjective sphere it makes sense. Where humans act on the natural environment, on the other hand, our actions must be judged not according to where they fall on a scale of good and evil but where they fall on a scale of care and neglect. When humans formed an independent relation with the Earth, we were left to choose between a path of care and a path of neglect.
It was Kant’s supreme insight that, for the enlightened human, freedom should be exercised within the constraints of self-imposed moral law. The moral law he had in mind, however, governed only our dealings with each other. If in the modern era freedom was understood as a relation between humans, as we enter the Anthropocene freedom must also, and primarily, be understood as it bears on our relationship with the Earth. The threat we present to the conditions of life is an expression of our agency, and any salvation can only be rooted in a radical change in how we understand and express our agency.
Freedom is always the freedom to destroy as well as create, and to destroy while creating. The worlds humans build may be in greater or lesser harmony with the constraints of nature’s processes. So if we are free to care for nature we are also free to neglect it, to despoil, abuse, and ravage it. Neglect belongs to humankind alone because we are given our autonomy. Nothing else can take the blame for the despoliation of the planet, so there must be something in our destiny, woven as a possibility into nature, and now as an actuality, that frees us to decide to create or destroy.
As we enter the Anthropocene, mere neglect seems inadequate when confronted with the far-reaching and manifold damage humans have done to the natural world in full knowledge of the effects – not only by disrupting the climate but also by extinguishing species and spoiling large swathes of oceans, land, and air. In contrast to “casual neglect” arising from carelessness, the willful failure to respond to the mountain of evidence of Earth System destabilization might be dubbed wanton neglect, that is, both reckless and self-indulgent. Neglect becomes wanton not simply on the basis of its scale but when its consequences are known, and where that knowledge is derived from the gift of scientific understanding, which enables us to see, with amazing if far-from-perfect clarity, how the physical world works. Wanton neglect is the abuse of this gift, because we subordinate it to our desires.
This freedom-as-abandon is the defining feature of late modernity. Just as evil proclaims itself as one way of being free in the social world (the literary exemplar is the figure of Raskolnikov), so the wanton neglect of the natural world is a sublime expression of our freedom (whose exemplars can be found in real life but not yet in literature). To achieve this form of freedom one must decide to revel in one’s autonomy without owning it, without taking responsibility for it. The predilection for care or neglect goes beyond morality; it expresses an orientation toward the natural world, to be in sympathy with it or to negate it. So I am not so much calling for a different kind of ethics; I am calling for a different kind of orientation to the Earth, one in which we understand deeply our extraordinary power and unique responsibility.
Wanton neglect should not be regarded as a deviation from the true nature of humans; it is in fact an affirmation of our true being – not in the sense that we are cursed by the urge to despoil but because the choices permitted by our agency reveal the essence of the human project, one that reaches its apogee in the conditions of late modernity. The openness given to humans to make the choice of how to care for the creation was the most tremendous ontological event. If we have taken the path of neglect, then that only affirms that freedom to care or neglect is inseparable from the being of humans. For humankind, how to create worlds while remaining within nature’s limits and according to its rhythms is the supreme challenge.
Once humans had attained their majority – embracing a scientific understanding of the world and developing the technological power to transform nature – it was not inevitable that the species would develop and deploy its colossal power so recklessly as to cause the Earth to enter into a perilous new geological epoch. The gradual increase in greenhouse gas emissions, from the invention of James Watt’s steam engine through to the Great Acceleration that followed World War II and which gathers pace even today in full knowledge of its hazards, was not the only path humans could have taken with their newfound freedom. While techno-industrialism and the structures of capitalism have powerful internal momentum, at every stage of development there have always been those calling for restraint. From the laments of the Romantic poets to the Naturphilosophie of the early nineteenth century, from Walden to deep ecology, from the Club of Rome to contemporary climate activism, a chorus of protest could always be heard. At times the chorus has been loud enough to compel governments to join in. In 1987, the nations of the world endorsed the recommendations of the Brundtland Report on sustainable development. In 1992, the Framework Convention on Climate Change committed the world, in principle at least, to adopt measures to prevent dangerous climate change. And, in 2015, world leaders gathered in Paris to reaffirm their nations’ pledges to work toward limiting global warming. So the campaigners have won some battles even if the war is not going well. Their efforts have been resisted at every stage by the forces of unrestrained expansion, so that every proposal to cut carbon emissions, for example, must be tempered by assurances that economic growth will not be impeded – which makes one wonder whether the world would merit saving if growth had to be slowed to save it.
There is a view that the carbon-intensive path to industrialization was unavoidable because it was only fossil energy that could power early factories. It is a strong argument, yet in the twentieth century a series of commercial and political decisions were made that could have seen the world swerve away from fossil energy. (France did.) Even now, cognisant of the dire consequences, decisions are still being made to privilege carbon-intensive energy sources. Vast new coalfields are being developed, along with new sources of carbon pollution like Canada’s tar sands. For 20 years, George Mitchell doggedly pursued the engineering technology for hydraulic fracturing, convinced that the world would burn whatever new sources of petroleum and natural gas could be opened up. If not for luck and persistence his gamble could easily have been lost; but in the end it was vindicated, with a fracking boom in new forms of fossil-fuel extraction under way in North America, Europe, Australia, and beyond, promising to extend the fossil-fuel age by decades. It may be true that one cannot stop progress, but the form of progress has always been contestable and open to variations.
If responsibility requires both the freedom to act and the power to act, it also requires the inclination to act according to principle. One can immediately see the dilemma. Before Europeans came of age they looked to God, or at least the divine texts and their interpreters, for moral guidance. If the “death of God” was enough to give Europeans the freedom to act, and science and industry gave them the power, where could they find the principles and motivation to act responsibly?
Kant devoted himself to explaining how, after we had attained our majority, reason itself could impose on us a set of duties. Yet the search for morality in the principle of non-contradiction was always doomed. If his theory could provide a reason, it could not provide a motive to act in the social interest, let alone the interests of the Earth. The utilitarian’s celebration of self-interest left responsibility to look after itself. As the intellectual justification for today’s global markets it has proven catastrophic. For the economists whose minds have been shaped by utilitarianism, the millennial-scale destabilization of the Earth System due to carbon emissions is turned into an “externality,” an effect that regrettably falls outside of the reach of markets and must therefore be brought into the utility-maximizing calculus of producers and consumers. In the deathless words of the Stern Review, climate change is “the greatest market failure the world has seen.” Where warm-blooded human beings fit into this calculus is unclear.
Writing in the 1940s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer cautioned against “the shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the busy, the comfortable, or the lascivious,” and embodied a kind of Christian moral seriousness in which one does not shy from one’s duties. But his Christian ethics, those of the Sermon on the Mount, were not strong enough to survive secularization. Similarly, Pope Francis’s appeal to the love of nature, welcome as it is, is anchored in an era long-gone and rests on an authority most do not recognize.
For several decades, social democracy’s pursuit of equality and the dignity of man survived by drawing on the moral legacy of Christianity, but by the 1970s it was too exhausted to resist being overwhelmed by neoliberal individualism. Social democratic thinkers now flail around looking for ways of coming to grips with the crisis of the Earth and end up in a social-only culde-sac.13 Pale green environmentalism has attempted to fill the void, but its two motivations – enlightened self-interest and a love of nature – could have only limited appeal or limited success, while the ecocentrism of deep green philosophy seems to most to suppress the central fact of human uniqueness, and of subjectivity itself.
So I think we have to confront the most difficult truth – in the Anthropocene we have no ethical resources to draw on. The cupboard is bare. For all of their worthiness, appeals to “responsibility” have no heft, no ontological substance. Where once we could fear and love God and truly believe in him and his saving power, now we can only fear Gaia. But Gaia is no messiah, which leaves self-preservation as the only motive, a negative motive that seems much too weak. Unless, that is, we can become beings guided by a new cosmological sense rooted in the profound significance of humankind in the arc of the Earth.
So what do we do? A new ethics cannot be conjured out of words on a page, but awaits the realization that this being called human has become something strange and unfamiliar, a being who stands at the point of transition between two geological epochs – one provided by nature to allow it to flourish and the other, molded by it, that threatens to undo civilization. The question that now haunts the universe is whether, in allowing humans free will, “nature” made a colossal mistake. The arrival of the Anthropocene signals a moment in planetary history in which modernity’s test is raised to an extreme degree. Are we to decide to press on doggedly with more of the same – more technological mastery, more exploitation of nature, more nihilism? Needless to say, this is the path of denial or willful recklessness for those who can only imagine a future as an enlarged version of the present, manufactured out of human ingenuity and resolve, even if it’s a vision now known to be impossible to realize. Or will new human beings emerge who embody another future, who allow themselves to be appropriated by the next future, who are willing to think eschatologically – that is, to think the end of the world of techno-industrial appropriation in an era of trial and struggle, to accept that the Enlightenment did not banish all darkness and that the lamp of Reason shines too dimly to guide us through the night falling over us?
How to finish a book like this? I don’t know; it’s too hard, too uncertain, too new. So let me just put down some last, stray thoughts, in the hope that they might stimulate better ones in the reader.
The arrival of the Anthropocene contradicts all narratives, philosophies, and theologies that foretell a preordained and continuous rise of humankind to ever-higher levels of material, social, or spiritual development. Stories of the irresistible triumph of humanity have themselves proven irresistible, from Hegel, Marx, Teilhard, and Maslow to metaphysical schemas of the “stages of consciousness” culminating in the divine or “superintegral.” And, of course, their DNA can be found in their bastard child, modern growthism.
Those who live after the time of darkness and see only the time of light ahead are deaf to the “cry of the Earth” in Pope Francis’s image; and isn’t that true of every Modern? The passing of “the dark ages” and the arrival of the light of science, reason, modernity, and social progress took us beyond the anxiety of the “end times.” We can no longer allow the possibility of regress, of the darkness returning; only the light can illuminate a path to the future.
There are those who believe salvation lies in the transcendent realm and those who want to make the transcendent immanent in this world. That modern political movements have a structure taken over from religion – the transcendent made immanent – may be a banal claim nowadays, but it serves to counter the more implausible belief that secularization took root because scientific facts proved that the transcendent realm was mere fantasy. The twentieth century was the century of ideologies promising Utopias on Earth. Each had found an essential flaw in the human world – the oppression of certain groups, insufficient economic development, a national historical grievance, a conspiracy of sinister forces – and each had the prescription for it. In all, however, the Earth was silently subsumed within the “order of being,” which was confined to the two worlds, worldly and transcendent, whether the transcendent remained in the divine realm or had been immanentized into the mundane. But now, in the Anthropocene, that order of being – both its religious version as man’s path to Heaven and its secular version as man’s striving for worldly Utopias – is disturbed because a third active element has intruded, the Earth itself.
If utopian aspirations belong to the Holocene, what does it mean if we no longer believe in the light? It does not mean we must live in the darkness but that we must live in the half-light of not-knowing, in the new atmosphere of endangerment. It means we must learn to live on this world, as it really is, the immanent as immanent rather than the transcendent immanentized, as Bruno Latour has put it. Of course, this is the hardest task of all, for we have sandbagged our existence against the floodwaters of doubt with the forces of technology, production, progress, and self-determination. To learn to live in the doubt on a capricious Earth may take generations.
“Who will wipe the blood off us?” cried Nietzsche’s madman. But perhaps there was no crime; the gods were not killed but simply withdrew, leaving for us the opportunity to create the future. By retreating they opened up something new on Earth, the prospect that humans could build new worlds emblazoned with hope. The opportunity has been seized beyond all imaginings; but only at the cost of jeopardizing the conditions of life on the planet. As we gaze into this Anthropocene century, we do not know our fate; it lies over the horizon. Perhaps there are new gods waiting there, strange gods whose plans for us we can only guess at.
This is the dispensation now returning, after progress: the rediscovery of the contingency of our existence in the cosmos, a contingency arising in the first place from the Earth System, an entity whose behavior reflects a precarious balance of enormously powerful forces and evades precise description, so that even the scientists most intimately familiar with its workings cast around for metaphors to capture its moods.
After the falling away of utopian dreams how do we respond to the return of this kind of contingency and endangerment? There is no precedent we can turn to. Most of us are unable to invest our faith in divine providence. The gods absconded long ago. Nor can the rupture in the comforting linearity of modern progress be answered by a return to a cyclical view of history, an eternal return of the same. Geology has taken care of that. Modernity, the era of self-assertion, in which the world took a break from teleology and opened up endless possibilities, is not returning to any kind of past known by humans. It remains a world of many possibilities except that now, to a disconcerting degree, some of the biggest “decisions” have been taken out of human hands and given back to the caprice of nature.
Can we find hope in this situation? If disturbance to the functioning of the Earth System is now to a greater or lesser degree irreversible, does this mean we must abandon ourselves to our fate? To do so would be to add moral cowardice to the list of infractions we already have to answer for. One thing is certain, though: the possibility of humanity’s redemption does not provide for any kind of personal salvation. The hope of personal salvation is one more manifestation of the essence of modernity and its founding thought, the preoccupation with the self. The solipsism of modern consciousness followed on from our alienation from both the transcendent and nature so that freedom could be understood as a project of personal liberation. In the face of an impending disaster, saving oneself while others suffer has always been an unforgivable choice. Today we hear it in a new context, one no less indecent, when certain evangelical pastors declare: “I don’t care about climate change. I will be in Heaven.” To which one cannot help thinking that for one so callous the other place is the more deserved destination.
Whatever its personal consolations, rediscovering the gods will not stop the unfolding of the Anthropocene and its disruptions. The only response to the threats of the Anthropocene is a collective one, politics. It is true that history frequently frustrates the ambitions of those who want to hurry it along; but it can also surprise us by suddenly opening up. Ecological campaigners have not been able to prevent climate disruption, and turn the world from neglect to care, although advances have been made. Even so, they have prepared the soil for a turn in history, although no one knows when that turn will come, when there might be, in Hannah Arendt’s well-chosen words, “an explosion of undercurrents which, having gathered their force in the dark, suddenly erupt.”14
Barring the final cataclysm of an asteroid strike, the “end time” for humanity is likely to be a drawn-out era of struggle whose outcome is unknown. If there is to be retribution for the misuse of our freedom, then instead of a single day of judgment it will take the form of “a summary court in perpetual session,” in Kafka’s image. Perhaps humans always had to pass through the trials of the Anthropocene in order to arrive at a reconciliation between our almost limitless potentiality and appetites and the finitude of the Earth, a long and jagged “Fall” as an unavoidable stage in the moral progress of the species. The imposition of planetary boundaries by the Earth System in the Anthropocene, harsh as it will be, might be seen by its survivors as the path to true liberation, the cost of learning to live in solidarity with the Earth.
Can humankind be redeemed? Will humans be given another chance after the manifest failure to protect the Earth, to fulfill its purpose of evolving in concord with the Earth’s benign possibilities? For those like Pope Francis who think in religious terms, “humanity has disappointed God’s expectations,” and they must wonder in their hearts whether the gods will finally turn away from their willful children and abandon them to their fate. The gods stand watching, in two minds. What would it mean for the cosmos to forsake humankind, they ask themselves, to allow it to ruin the Earth and deprive the cosmos of the being uniquely able to marvel at it and endow it with meaning? There is punishment enough to deal out; after all, the last million humans would suffice to fulfill the “telos” of the cosmos.
At times it seems impossible that this beautiful, shining planet should flower with a form of life endowed with the ability to render the universe knowable, only to see it withdraw into the darkness of unconsciousness. The hope this thought kindles is perhaps not one for our own futures, or for those of any descendants we can envision, but for another humanity, contrite and wiser. Having rejected their destiny as keepers of the planet, humans would then have been won over to it. There would, of course, be an eon of regret, of species-shame, in which humans experience the consequences of their neglect, before a process of repair and rejuvenation could occur. We cannot say that such a second civilization would vindicate the sorrows endured in the Anthropocene. The second civilization is too far off and uncertain for it to have any bearing on our times. We cannot picture that future realm of being; nor can we be sure that a resurrected humanity would take its second chance. If there is no guarantee of this eventuality, it nevertheless seems certain that those new humans, whose task is to build a new civilization from the planetary ashes of the old one, would look at those ashes and declare “Never again.”