[D66] [JD: 18] The Politics of the Anthropocene in a World After Neoliberalism

[R.O.]

  The Politics of the Anthropocene in a World After Neoliberalism

By
Duncan Kelly
Boston Review
16 min
View Original 
<http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/duncan-kelly-politics-anthropocene-world-after-neoliberalism>

This essay is featured in /Boston Review/’s new book, /Climate Action./

*Order A Copy Today* <https://store.bostonreview.net/climate-action>

Historian Adam Tooze has argued that COVID-19 is the first economic 
crisis of the /Anthropocene/, a term encapsulating the idea that human 
impact on the environment and climate is so extreme that it has moved us 
out of the Holocene into a new geological epoch. While this argument 
remains the subject of deep disagreement among experts, those advocating 
for the Anthropocene emphasize that humans have so drastically altered 
the environment that we have become agents of transformations we cannot 
reliably control. Indeed, we are daily reminded of these effects by 
extreme weather events, species extinctions, and new global health 
emergencies.

Why has it proven so difficult politically to act in the face of ample 
evidence of an increasingly uninhabitable Earth?

The most pressing and most obvious of these forces is the novel 
coronavirus, which has exposed the frailties of political systems in 
so-called advanced democracies in collectively terrifying but 
individually unsurprising ways. As with other pandemics, the least 
powerful and most insecure members of society are those who suffer the 
most. If one of the challenges posed by the Anthropocene is to rethink 
the evaluative and ecological foundations of our politics in dramatic 
new ways, it might help to make better sense of the challenges we 
face—and to build a better and fairer world after neoliberalism—to 
explore the convoluted route by which we have arrived at this point. The 
pandemic struck at a moment of deep-seated disaffection with democratic 
politics after forty years of neoliberalism and the rise of new forms of 
authoritarian and populist politics.

Facing his own era-defining political crisis, German chancellor Gustav 
Stresemann (1878–1929) took the title of a 1920 silent film starring 
Bela Lugosi, /Dance on the Volcano/, and turned it into a serious 
metaphor by which to describe the economic threats faced amid the rise 
and decline of the Weimar Republic—from military defeat and a quietly 
successful democratic revolution to economic catastrophe, militaristic 
nationalism, and rising anti-Semitism. While the early 2020s are 
certainly not the late 1930s, the metaphor remains convincing.

Can today’s crises inspire action at the scales required to think about 
planetary sustainability? Why has it proven so difficult politically to 
act in the face of ample evidence of an increasingly uninhabitable 
Earth, to which now can be added the threat of COVID-19?

*• • •*

During the pandemic, Tooze has disinterred German sociologist Ulrich 
Beck as an unlikely Virgil to guide us through this uncertain modern 
purgatory. Beck’s thinking about what he termed “risk society” seems 
even more pertinent during an Anthropocene pandemic than it did 
thirty-five years ago.

Reflecting on environmental fallout, Chernobyl, and ecological politics 
in 1980s Germany, Beck asked what it meant to live amidst the new risks 
of modern society—from disease and radioactive fallout to still broader 
forms of ecological calamity. How, he wondered in /Risk Society/ (1986), 
can we “live on the volcano of civilization without deliberately 
forgetting about it, but also without suffocating on the fears” that 
erupt from within? This combination of scientific knowledge of threats, 
alongside a fear of the invisible agency of both viral and radioactive 
hazards, offers a perverse combination of hypermodernism amid a sort of 
quasi-religious fear and primitivism around the unseen. Such an unstable 
compound formed part of Beck’s search for a more “reflexive” form of 
modernization. As he put it in /Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk/ 
(1995), society in the age of climate crisis—when we are “confronted by 
the challenges of the self-created possibility, hidden at first, then 
increasingly apparent, of the self-destruction of all life on this 
earth”—passes through two stages.

Merely “following the science” will not get us anywhere close to a more 
progressive future.

The first offers technocratic solutionism, grounded in models of 
economic growth and progress, which allows modern experts something like 
“wardship” of Earth. And while democracy might “twitch” at moments of 
mismanagement by technocrats, it can do so only after its practical 
“demise” as a political force in the first place. During this stage, all 
trends point toward ever greater power in the hands of unelected 
experts, while democracy continues to function as an ideological 
illusion—a spell cast over the world by a word only loosely connected to 
how power is exercised in day-to-day politics.

The second stage of risk society, what Beck termed _“hazard 
civilization,”_ takes place at the level of knowledge production. As we 
become increasingly aware of the fragility of our situation and the 
proximity of existential risks and hazards, we obviously become more and 
more beholden to experts for understanding and surviving the threats 
they have done so much to inform us about. Yet at the same time that 
they offer complex and rarefied knowledge about problems that threaten 
our collective existence, scientists and experts show—in full view of 
the public—the powerful disagreements, divergences, and dissonance among 
themselves in the production and distribution of expert claims. Just 
think of the politicking behind the massive documents and appendices of 
the 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which 
focused on the need to keep future warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius. 
In turn it quickly became a rallying cry, taken up particularly by those 
on the frontline of climate change in the Caribbean, suggesting that 
this was really about “1.5 to stay alive.”

_As figures such as Bruno Latour have emphasized, increased awareness of 
science as an argumentative social practice and continuous process of 
negotiation and interpretation serves two conflicting functions. On the 
one hand, it provides intellectual emancipation from ignorance: 
recognizing complexity and uncertainty is a form of liberation. But on 
the other hand, it also breeds skepticism about scientific knowledge. 
This can, in turn, make possible reactionary forms of critique, quickly 
taken up by institutions and ideologies seeking to benefit from the 
status quo. Such a state of affairs leaves us even further adrift, for 
the insidious threats of risk society and hazard civilization are also 
social and massively unequally distributed. As Beck wrote, in the face 
of massive hazards and existential threat, what use is a society that 
protects individuals in their acquisition of extreme wealth and that 
legitimates massive levels of income and wealth inequality through 
property rights at the same time that it “legalizes large-scale hazards 
on the strength of its own authority, foisting them on everyone, 
including even those multitudes who resist them”?_

[...]

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