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<h1 class="agrq4zn">The Politics of the Anthropocene in a
World After Neoliberalism</h1>
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<div class="b5fas5x">By</div>
<div class="a10bb9a5"><span class="awkz85g">Duncan Kelly</span></div>
<div class="d1slxp1m">Boston Review</div>
<div class="t1wtd119">16 min</div>
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<section>
<div>This essay is featured in <em>Boston Review</em>’s
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<font size="-1" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Historian
Adam Tooze has argued that COVID-19 is the first
economic crisis of the <em>Anthropocene</em>, 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.</font><font
size="-1"><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Why has
it proven so difficult politically to act in the
face of ample evidence of an increasingly
uninhabitable Earth?</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">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.</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Facing
his own era-defining political crisis, German
chancellor Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) took the
title of a 1920 silent film starring Bela Lugosi,
<em>Dance on the Volcano</em>, 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.</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">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?</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><strong>•
• •</strong></font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">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.</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">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 <em>Risk Society</em>
(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 <em>Ecological Politics in an Age of
Risk</em> (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.</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Merely
“following the science” will not get us anywhere
close to a more progressive future.</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">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.</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The
second stage of risk society, what Beck termed <u>“hazard
civilization,”</u> 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.”</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
</font><br>
<u><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">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”?</font></u><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
</font></font></div>
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