[Dec.24, 2019 — This article is a first draft text currently undergoing a degree of re-writing. I will add here a note once it has stabilized for a final print.]
§1. Do Preferences And A Consensus of Scientists Ever Help?
I like ecologists and must admit nothing is more tender that watching a young Greta Thunberg pout her way into conferences and demand what is true and just.
I also prefer bicycle riders to those in cars, Bernie to Trump, the protection of native Indian lands over the rights of big oil, and my deceased mother’s homemade marmalade to those you find in the stores.
But when all is said and done, these are only preferences and amount to little more when addressing the significant problems facing our modern-day democracies, especially with regard to climate change.
I am also embarrassed to admit my uneasiness with slogans like “Save The Planet,” “Climate Change Is Going to Kill Us All,” “Restore the Planet,” etc.
Whether backed up by religion or modern science, haven’t such apocalyptic slogans, along with the doomsayers, been around for thousands of years?
And haven’t they always been equally met with the naysayers who deny their evidence and the end of the world?
Is there something wrong when the important message of an ecological movement gets stuck in an ancient vicious circle that society never responds to?
Of course, I am not accusing the modern science backing the ecologists’ movement on climate change of being equal to the flame gazing and prophecies of Nostradamus.
Rather I am proposing that making public predictions on nature are symptomatic and that there needs to be a way of exiting from the current deadlocks.
But let’s suppose this is not the problem: that there is a consensus between the experts and the majority of people who believe that climate change science is true and the earth is endangered by human activity. This is probably the dominant view today.
Then why is there still such difficulty to do something about it?
At the close of the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCC-COP25) established to meet the obligations of the Earth Summit (1992) and the Paris Agreement, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that he was disappointed by the result, while other U.N. officials spoke of “another year of failure”. Alden Meyer, head of the Union of Concerned Scientists proclaimed:
Never have I seen the almost total disconnect we’ve seen here at COP25 in Madrid between what the climate requires and what the climate negotiations are delivering in terms of meaningful action. (Democracy Now, Mon.Dec. 16, 2019)
In light of these now systematic failures, some questions should be asked not simply about climate change, but the types of protocol set up to address it:
- Can an argument be made for climate justice that would go beyond the conflicts or consensus of experts expressing the science on one hand and the preferences of the politicians and public on the other?
- Indeed, can the case be made that even if the majority of people believe human activity is the cause of climate change today, there is still little we can do about it except protest against what our governments seem unable, or at least unwilling, to act upon?
- Is the blockage and inaction underlined in question #2, simply responded to by a political reform? Does it suffice to simply change a president, political party, or system to finally act upon climate change?
I show there is a positive response to questions (1), a negative response to (3), while the paradoxical inaction of (2) can be shown to result from an inadequate analysis of Nature and the Artifice of human activity.
To respond to questions (1)definitively requires reopening a question on the divide commonly accepted between an uninformed public and an enlightened science. How can not only the utility but the truth of scientific research be evaluated, if the research itself is not simply left to a kind of ‘survival of the fittest’ or scientific Darwinism? A mode of scientific productivity based on the quantity of publications, funding, competition, and an ideal of optimization.
To respond to questions (2) and (3)definitively requires showing how a political response is inadequate and a change of science – a reform of understanding of modern science, its concept of Nature, and its relation to society — must be undertaken. The task of this short article is to give the outlines of such a reform to determine a Different Strategy For Climate Justice.
§2. The Nature of the Symptom Is Not The Symptom of Nature
I call ecologists those concerned and often heroic people carrying out a thankless job listening to symptoms of nature in order to protect it, demand change, and find ways to disrupt the governmental-military-industrial complex which is taken as the cause of such symptoms.
Take away the cause, as the saying goes, and the symptoms will disappear.
If this eco-strategy works, then the mobilization against climate change today should work in the same way scientists and countries mobilized to eradicate polio in the ’50s and ‘60s.
But is the medical model the right one to address a cure for climate change?
For example, at present, the developed nations have the technology and resources to wipe out poverty and hunger not only in their own countries but in developing countries such as Africa.
The question is:
Why aren’t we doing so?
A first response: the lack of progress on climate change is evidence that it is a political problem. That if governments were more pro-active with regard to the scientific research, and if there were not so many lobbyists from big business barring the way, then real progress could be achieved. From this viewpoint, a change of politicians, parties, or even political systems is necessary to achieve results.
This response is only half-right: no doubt, just as the problems of poverty and world hunger, climate change is not simply a technological problem, it can not be simply addressed by a medical model treating the symptoms of nature indicative of a disease. There is a political dimension of the symptom that must be addressed.
But what is this political dimension? Does it simply mean more rallying in the streets, better organization, more judicial procedures, more effective legislation, and delivery systems in society?
The position of this paper is that such political interventions remain inadequate to the degree they only manage the symptoms without determining any real foundation for work on the cause of climate change that goes beyond what the scientists tell us.
Second response: If there is a political dimension to the symptom of climate change, this does not mean it is a purely ‘societal problem’, rather the political order of the symptom is founded on a real of climate change itself. What needs to be shown is that this real of politics is every bit as real as what the scientists of Nature are addressing, but has another name: Artifice.
This statement requires explaining.
Instead of addressing climate change as a symptom of nature that is studied by scientists and managed by societal caretakers — ecologists, politicians, CEOs, etc. — the political order of the symptom requires a finer analysis and an inversion: we must address the nature of the symptom indicative of a much more difficult and artificial illness.
What is the nature of this symptom and the ‘illness’ of Artifice?
In general, for the ecologist, it is any production by humans that causes a loss, falsification, perversion, or pollution of Nature.
In particular, this ‘illness’ of Artifice is the military-industrial complex at the forefront of our modern-day democracies.
Yet, we may well ask if this Artifice reduced to a military-industrial complex is not itself a symptom of a cause that is being avoided in the debate on climate change.
Call this avoided cause the current scientific-political order.
The foundation of it study, not its political management, entails a non-ecological argument that can be broken down into five steps:
- If the cause of climate change is not simply found in Nature, the waters are getting warmer, ozone thinner, etc.,
- but in an Artifice: a governmental-military-industrial complex,
- and this complex is itself, with a second clearer look, only an effect — a symptom of a scientific-political order –
- then we will have to do more than simply protect nature, demand change, pass legislation, and disrupt the military-industrial complex to make any headway in treating the real cause.
- We need to treat the current scientific-political order from the beginning and study its anti-physics (§3.Below)
For the question, ‘Why aren’t we making progress?’ also asks what would positively motivate someone, a group of scientists, politicians, or country to do the right thing, to act ethically, with regards to climate change and the nature of the symptom.
This call for the reform of understanding the relationship between science and society requires, in the first instance, a reform of the understanding of a real of politics that would disengage itself both from its representational function in a democracy and Realpolitik.
No longer politics in the sense of the Greek tradition of the Humanitas, an ideal polis ruled by the top in a group of cultured masters and tyrants, modern politics engages the tradition of the Anthropos — a socius no longer represented by the cultural values or representative politics of the masters, but the forces of the multitude and society itself.
The notion that modern socialism, unlike democracy, would be attempting to change the society and not legislation and representative policies, is one indication among many of a real of politics unleashed in modernity.
Yet, if this real is no longer treated as a mere societal problem or what Freud would call the ‘Discontents of Civilization’, but the problem Artifice plays in a science of Nature — the nature of the symptom — then we make room for an anti-physics and generalize the political in terms of the ethical.
§3. Anti-Physics versus Ecology
Modern physical sciences are, unlike that of ancient Greece, not theories of Nature in the philosophical sense of phusis or being, but an anti-physics: its modus operandi being literally to replace Nature with something like an Artifice or prosthetic in order to make it function — which does not necessarily mean it will be useful or a desired effect for society¹.
Thus, the political dimension of an anti-physics is intrinsic since it addresses something unsatisfactory about a Nature that must always be supplemented with Artifice.
One can think of the way modern physical sciences do not directly act upon Nature itself without, in the first instance, introducing an Artifice: an experimental apparatus or model.
Or again, one need only think of the modern farming of cotton that provides the raw material for a factory to make clothes. Just as farming pollutes its rivers in the use of fertilizers and insecticides, the factory pollutes the rivers and air in the use of its chemical treatments. At each step, Nature is not only supplemented by Artifice, but there is no direct access to Nature except through a series of laws and regulations.
In both instances, it is this anti-physics of Artifice supplementing Nature, that I call here the nature of a symptom.
Anti-physics is an Artifice that supplements Nature.
The question today is whether there is anyone around to study this anti-physics as such, or must it always be approached ecologically as a symptom of nature: as a loss of nature, a falsification, inauthenticity, pollution, etc.
For the ecologist, Nature exists before the human and desire. The latter only arise through the Artifice, most notably through western civilization, that brings with it aberrant desire, the destruction of Nature, and guilt over its loss.
Inversely, one may well ask whether any attempt to moralize, sentimentalize, and escape the nature of the symptom — and not rethink its causality — rediscovers Artifice redoubled with a vengeance.
The early tradition of painting ‘Still-Lifes’ or in French ‘Nature Morte’ (Dead Nature), teaches us about this paradoxical redoubling of artifice: using the artifice of painting to depict Nature, the fruits and vegetables are represented in a somber vision of domesticity.
At the limit, humans themselves become the Artifice they are attempting to track down and extinguish. This is not a futuristic Blade-Runner story, but a recent article by the French CNRS (National Center of Research and Science) asks whether from the viewpoint of the fauna of Nature the human must be considered a carcinogenic species.
In the default of rethinking an anti-physics, an ecologist can try to act out Nature, sue the industries polluting it, and reform the governments not doing enough to protect it, but in the end, it will never be sure its Idea of Nature is anything more than a myth.
The ideology of the ecologist did not begin yesterday but has a long history of naturalism going from ancient Greece to modern-day Tarzan stories: it is a moral approach to Nature expressed in a guilt over its loss and corruption by Artifice. But if a more precise definition of Nature cannot be established, then how can any effective action be taken?
Schematizing the difference of strategies between anti-physics and ecology:
What I want to show in the remainder of the article is how another, more precise, less ideological, way of reading and listening to the nature of the symptom is necessary.
§4. Save Haiti! Guilty Aid For A Natural Disaster
I n 2010, Haiti was struck by a magnitude seven earthquake. It was one of the country’s most severe earthquakes with an estimated death toll to reach 200,000 people. Immediately the call when out to Save Haiti! while the relief effort began with humanitarian and military-style operations from over 20 countries.
Not only were countries and humanitarian groups involved, but major recording artists came together to do a charity concert — We Are The World 25 — while the newfound uses of social media were put to use, informing and connecting people across the world. North Americans alone donated over 1.4 billion dollars to NGOs in the year following the disaster.
But in the end, after over 13 billion dollars were spent as relief aid to Haiti, where are they left today?
In a short 2015 article from NBC News states:
[…] five years after an earthquake left corpses and rubble piled across Haiti, 85,000 people still live in crude displacement camps and many more in deplorable conditions.
The disconnect between the massive amount of private and public aid and the poverty, disease and homelessness that still plague the country raises a question that critics say is too difficult to answer: Where did all that money go?
My aim is not to respond to the question posed by this article of where the money went, but to ask instead what motivated people to act and send money in the first place.
There may seem like an obvious response: there were people in need from a disaster, so we sent money To Save Haiti!
But Haiti was in need and in a crisis long before the 2010 earthquake struck. The quake just served to make things evident.
In fact, if you begin to read the communications carefully between the various governments, humanitarian groups, and people from around the world at the time, the primary motivation for ‘helping their neighbor’ was not simply people wanted to do good, but that they felt guilty.
Here we are in the U.S., and the developed nations in general, in the face of a poverty-stricken country being ravaged by an earthquake.
We can’t let them face this disaster alone, not only would it be bad for them, but how would we look sitting idly in our luxury while hundreds of thousands of poor people die?
We better send along some millions to show our charitable nature!
While forgetting to ask if the money actually gets to the Haitian people and not the NGOs and humanitarian groups (see the film Where Did All The Money Go?).
Indeed, one may well ask if the poor would have died more slowly in Haiti, not from a natural disaster, but just from ‘natural causes,’ would the world governments, humanitarian agencies, and rock stars have noticed anything at all.
But here the tough questions come to the fore:
- What is the problem with the efficacy of any movement when it acts from the place of guilt?
- More specifically, what is the problem when a government, relief agency, scientific research, or humanitarian group are motivated to act primarily, if not exclusively, from empathetic feelings based on guilt?
- Of course, nobody is willing to admit there is any guilt to begin with. Instead, our modern agencies and governments only want to speak of responsibility: of being held responsible professionally. Does this avoidance of the subject of guilt and its replacement by professional responsibility signal an ethical bypass?
- Will the nature of the symptom respond to a humanitarian action whose primary motivation is guilt? (that is only admitted as professional responsibility)
The response to question (1) and (2) is evident: such interventions are always too late, not enough, mostly ineffective, and not cost-efficient. While the response to question (4) can be shown to be negative by example: from Haitian Disaster Relief to Palestinian Aid and Welfare for America’s Inner Cities, the results in each case are unimpressive. Because of the limits of this article, question (3) is only stated here to indicate what is at stake and in anticipation of a response in a future article².
And this is where my story circles back to the ecologist and climate change.
§5. The Guilt Of Climate Change
There is evidence from the scientific community that global warming is caused by greenhouse gases and human productivity, but such knowledge remains inert without a motivation or will to act upon it.
Where is this will-to-action and knowledge to come from?
When people shout, Save the Planet!, citing evidence of how much the industrialized nations are polluting the world, are they just acting out of guilt?
How many of these slogans are using the crisis of the hour to remain within their fears instead of determining what is really at stake in an orchestrated action for climate justice?
How many of these slogans are motivated by the morality of the naturalist where Artifice and fabrication are only part of the problem — they only emerge in the loss and falsification of Nature — and not part of the solution?
The question of how to use scientific knowledge, or whether it can even be used at all to address climate change without being continually contested by others with differing viewpoints, belies a series of more difficult questions:
- What can motivate the ecologist’s speech and action if we cannot rely upon a morality based on feelings of guilt? The celebrated ecologist Rachel Carson called for a ‘love of nature’ that would not become a ‘bunny hugger’ or a ‘cult for the balance of nature’ (See Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; 1962). The question as to whether she manages to avoid the guilt of the naturalist will not be addressed here.
- How to distinguish an effective action with regard to climate change without falling back into a reflex of guilt in the face of urgency? Such actions always being too little, too late, and not enough.
- How to create an effective intervention addressing climate change that doesn’t simply repose on the degradation of Nature by human fabrication? Such actions always contain a naturalist ideology whose morality gets in the way of effective action.
It should be pointed out that the current proposal in the U.S. by left-wing politicians for a Green New Deal, as hopeful as it sounds, meets all three criteria for failure. It proceeds by 1) guilt, 2) crisis, and 3) an ideology of the degradation of Nature. Citing the Resolution:
- guilt “Whereas, because the United States has historically been responsible for a disproportionate amount of greenhouse gas emissions” (p.3)
- crisis “the United States is currently experiencing several related crises” (p.3)
- degradation of Nature by “human activity”(p.2).
(See Resolution of the Green New Deal H.RES.109, Feb. 7, 2019)
No doubt, such a study is only being outlined here, but if this analysis is correct, then the Green New Deal may expect the same type of frustrations, if not impotence, that the 2010 plan for Haiti Disaster Relief revealed.
§6. A Different Strategy For Climate Change
T o respond to the questions posed by the last section, a more detailed examination is, no doubt, in order. Yet, out of respect for the limits of this article, I will only give a survey of the possibilities here.
- First, why not just admit we are all guilty from the beginning, Artifice is part of Nature just as Nature is part of Artifice. The crisis and degradation of Nature has always already occurred. We are all guilty of this, from the beginning, even if we have done nothing. Now, let’s get clear on what this anti-physics is and determine its logic of the supplement.
- Can we use the emotional category of guilt to isolate a real of an anti-physics that goes beyond the mere sentiments of the researcher to reveal the actual misuse of science-politics?³ For example, what keeps a DNA researcher up at night when she recognizes her lab experiments may be nocive to society? Or what makes a whistleblower reveal the extent to which software programs are being used to spy on private individuals in society?
- Instead of trying to motivate science, businesses, and governments politically after the fact, after an ecological crisis or symptom of nature, why not address the nature of the symptom before the fact, as an anti-physics, when there is no crisis in view? In short, instead of attempting to manage the symptoms of nature, why not found a research into the nature of the symptom?
- Why does a scientific-political order always have to be addressed in the face of a crisis, with the guilt of being too late, with not enough money or time, and most often in charitable situations where people are asked to donate money to a ‘good’ cause? Why can’t a scientific-political order be treated and addressed in a research department with adequate time and funding from the start? — and not as a cause for charity?
- Instead of viewing Desire and Artifice as coming after Nature, as forms of falsification, inauthenticity, guilt, perversion, and pollution, why not admit Desire and Artifice come first, while what needs to be constructed is not an Idea of Nature but a coherent Desire of Nature? If successful, Desire would not simply fall back into the obscenities of perversion, guilt, and pollution, but furnish the motivation for a theory and practice of anti-physics that no longer falls back into guilt, crisis, and the ideology of degradation.
Far from being anti-science, such preliminary questions situate a strategy of hyper-vigilance.
By this I mean, a researcher can — and should — work in spite of the idealizations of science to treat its existence and effects on society, not as applications of science, but as a question intrinsic to an anti-physics.
Today, it is not a question of whether we should be producing alternatives to fossil fuels in order to fight against climate change since the production of such alternatives could have been produced years ago if we had had research programs and an international body in place to address the nature of the symptom and its anti-physics
The question today is why hasn’t such a program been set up and what is holding our politicians hostage to a mode of scientific production out of step with society?
Until these questions are responded to, we will only have an ecological movement in face of a crisis. Though some may argue this is better than nothing, it is still just a bandaid on a problem whose cause is not being addressed.
Notes
[1] The term Nature comes from, Natura, which is the Latin translation of the ancient Greek, φύσις, or phusis. The dominant way to define Nature in the Greek tradition is to claim that, unlike Artifice, Nature’s object and cause comes from within itself. Heidegger writes ‘Natura means “that which lets something originate from itself”. ON THE BEING AND CONCEPTION OF ΦΥΣΙΣ IN ARISTOTLE’S PHYSICS B, 1 p.222. Thus, an object like a shoe finds its cause outside of itself in the handiwork of the artisan; whereas a tree may be said to grow and produce fruit ‘naturally’. Just how this natural causality is self-referential is not clear in the Greek and Western tradition as it seems to require the intervention of the Gods (Homer/Hesoid) or the God of Nature (from Aristotle to Newton). What may be indicated with more certainty is that the hypothesis of the God of Nature is no longer required at least since Hegel (see his Naturphilosophie), Marx, and Freud. What this loss implies for the concept of and causality of Nature, will not be entered into further in such a short article.
[2]&[3]; After this expository article, it will be necessary to situate the problem of guilt not as an emotion or Christian morality (as a reflection over doing something good or bad), but as a problem of existence and desire. Such a future work, no doubt, will have to reconsider guilt in light of the analysis of Heidegger, Freud, and Lacan.
=================================
Winter 2019
Los Angeles, CA
