One of three images for the Destroying nature is destroying life campaign
by the environmental group Robin Wood (2016)
I.
Someone writes to tell me that I should spend less time writing about trivial matters such as fashion and focus instead on the unfolding eco-apocalypse - the latter being something caused by human activity and which has, apparently, been confirmed by numerous scientific studies.
I have to admit, I'm a bit sceptical about this green-tinged end of the world narrative and tend to share the view expressed by Phil Hammond and Hugh Ortega Breton that it's best understood "neither as a near-timeless feature of human culture nor as a reasoned response to objective environmental problems. Rather, it is driven by unconscious fantasy; the symbolic expression of an alienation from political subjectivity, characteristic of a historically specific period in the life of post-Cold War societies."
If it's true that some environmental activists find apocalyptic language not only appropriate but sexy, many regard such alarmist rhetoric as problematic and often counter-productive - not least of all because, actually, the science doesn't support such quasi-religious mania, even whilst confirming there are important issues we need to address as a species.
I have to admit, I'm a bit sceptical about this green-tinged end of the world narrative and tend to share the view expressed by Phil Hammond and Hugh Ortega Breton that it's best understood "neither as a near-timeless feature of human culture nor as a reasoned response to objective environmental problems. Rather, it is driven by unconscious fantasy; the symbolic expression of an alienation from political subjectivity, characteristic of a historically specific period in the life of post-Cold War societies."
If it's true that some environmental activists find apocalyptic language not only appropriate but sexy, many regard such alarmist rhetoric as problematic and often counter-productive - not least of all because, actually, the science doesn't support such quasi-religious mania, even whilst confirming there are important issues we need to address as a species.
II.
Having said that, I must confess that there was a period, in the late 1980s, when I wilfully bought into this fantasy of eco-apocalypse: I even joined the Green Party! I was soon expelled, however, for holding extreme views that threatened to bring the party into disrepute.
(This was fair enough: but I smiled when, shortly afterwards, party spokesman David Icke revealed on primetime TV that he was the Son of God and gleefully predicted the world was about to be devestated by a series of natural catastrophes.)
Thankfully, by the time that James Lovelock was issuing his final warning and Al Gore was telling anyone who would listen his inconvenient truth, I was no longer convinced (nor secretly thrilled) by such climate porn and doom-laden prophecy concerning the collapse of civilisation and extinction of all life on earth.
Indeed, I had spent a good deal of time in the 1990s deconstructing my own eco-romanticism influenced by such figures as D. H. Lawrence, Martin Heidegger, and Jaz Coleman and although my Ph.D was meant to be an examination of Nietzsche's cultural pessimism and political philosophy, it was basically an opportunity for me to confront the elements in my own thought that had led towards the black hole of fascism.
So, I understand perfectly where my critic is speaking from; for I used to occupy much the same space and share many of his concerns. The difference is, whereas he stood his ground and allowed his views to become fixed beliefs, I kept moving and kept questioning things - particularly those social anxieties that function as truths within contemporary culture.
In a sense, that's what torpedo the ark means: refuse all dogma and interrogate everything; including radical environmentalism which mixes ascetic idealism and crusading mythology into a potent brew designed to intoxicate the young and provide a sense of revolutionary mission - for a little child shall lead them ...
See: Philip Hammond and Hugh Ortega Breton, 'Eco-Apocalypse: Environmentalism, Political Alienation and Therapeutic Agency', Ch. 8 of The Apocalypse in Film: Dystopias, Disasters, and Other Visions about the End of the World, ed. Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Angela Rewani, (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). Click here to read online.
Play: REM: 'It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)', single from the album Document (I.R.S. Records, 1987): click here. Note: the video was directed by James Herbert and features a young skateboarder called Noah Ray.
Play: REM: 'It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)', single from the album Document (I.R.S. Records, 1987): click here. Note: the video was directed by James Herbert and features a young skateboarder called Noah Ray.
It's interesting (and to me more than a little strange) to see classical psychoanalytic categories ('unconscious fantasy', 'alienation', 'symbolic expression' and 'subjectivity') being used on TTA as supposed stable weapons to demolish an uncongenial climatological narrative. Who'd have thunk it!
ReplyDeleteWhatever the stylistic and poetic merits, moreover, of mystagogues like Heidegger, novelists like Lawrence and philosopher-madmen like Nietzsche, they can hardly be relied upon to conduct a sober examination of the contemporary scientific facts about climate change (not least because they're all long dead)!
I would suggest, if anything, that it is the media's marginalisation of pioneering authorities like Lovelock in order to hold their readers in a state of semi-anaesthetised self-deception about the end of civilisation, while keeping on track an unlikely and pitifully unsupported narrative that the micropolitics of bourgeois recycling and the vague environmental targets of state governments can avert catastrophe (converting real desperation into a consumeristic redemption narrative), is the real sickness that continues to poison the body politic. While a very eminient nonogenarian scientist in the form of Lovelock has in recent years somewhat attenuated his counsel of despair, David Wallace-Wells is an important contemporary climatologist who hasn't -interested readers may care to consult his very recently published 'The Uninhabitable Earth' in order to make sure they never sleep easily again. This man knows his ecocidal onions, and he's under no illusions about the horrors for which - barring the late arrival of Heidegger's hoped-for god - we're inexorably headed.
If anything, I would suggest, what psychology can and should be helping us with is the human all too human tendency to look no further than the ends of our noses, whereby most use mechanisms of denial, rationalisation and scapegoating of those who stick their heads above the parapet while burying their own heads in the sands like brain-dead ostriches in this domain.
Like it nor not, Romantically or not, the children of Britain (who, being children, are closer to the life-force and hence to the unconscious) clearly know something their supposed adult caretakers would rather keep from them in order to keep the mean machinery of international capitalism in business at all costs - which is why they are now striking in their thousands on the streets of Britain.
As James Hillman's work powerfully conveys, finally, not everything is questionable or tractable to the same extent any more than (as Stephen recently - though unnecessarily - reminded me) all readings of texts are equally valid, because not everything is fluid. There are rocks in the psyche and rocks in the future. Keeping moving, that restless futurist fantasy of speed, is as much of a lie, taken one-sidedly, as the Christian commandment to 'be still and know that I am God'.
1. Are you saying these "classical psychoanalytic categories" are untenable to the extent that they can't even be used strategically (provisionally, ironically)?
Delete2. Are you seriously claiming that Lovelock has been "marginalised" by the MSM? Maybe you might like to Google his name and see what comes up ...
3. To to say Lovelock has "somewhat attenuated" his eco-apocalyptic worldview is putting it mildly, don't you think?
4. David Wallis-Wells is a hack with a flair for writing science fiction: in that sense, yes, you're right, he knows his "ecocidal onions" - and who his target audience are.
5. The (mostly white and predominantly middle class) children of Britain have been groomed by green evangelists (and Guardian reading parents and teachers) for decades into the eco-apocalyptic worldview. It's little wonder they're so traumatised - one might almost call it a form of abuse.
6. Maybe Hillman's right about "rocks in the psyche" - but my concern is with people who seem to have rocks in their head.
Other readers will be making up their own hearts and minds. But, with ultra-condensed brevity:
ReplyDelete1. Ah yes, the post-modern defence of 'irony' - compressed to the point of impalpability.
2. I'd say, yes, Lovelockian apocalypse has been marginalised - the idea that the earth is going to die and so are most of us tends not to sell newspapers the last time I checked.
3. See above. He still thinks it's all over, I believe - even if an act of god might save us.
4. There is some creative/polemical licence in some aspects of Wallis-Wells' (sic) - read Wallace-Wells' - presentation. As Kierkegaard and Nietzsche knew, a degree of exaggeration is crucial to the transmission of unpalatable truths, and also a soupcon of style. (I don't go to TTA for reasonable and balanced reportage, so maybe the blogger just finds DDW too close to him for comfort.) Readers can review here scientists' (mixed) evaluation of his thesis:
https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-explain-what-new-york-magazine-article-on-the-uninhabitable-earth-gets-wrong-david-wallace-wells/
5. Re the children's ecostrikes, the idea that children can't think for themselves (and in many cases are defying their schools and parents), or belittling/patronising them by resenting them for being supposedly a white/middle-class demographic (they aren't), is (imo) reductive, ridiculous and takes us nowhere.
6. As I tried to explain, I'm concerned about the implications of presenting an ontological economy where what counts is to think about everything apart, it seems, from one's own assumptions. Sometimes it's time to stop and stare, rather than 'keeping moving' at all costs like some guilty criminal.
1. That's the best kind of irony; super-diluted so as to leave only a homeopathic trace (a smile without the cat).
Delete2. Probably best you don't apply for a job on Fleet Street if you think sensationalist headlines (not least of all about climate change and the coming apocalypse) don't sell newspapers.
3. I thought he (Lovelock) was more worried about robots and AI now than global warming ...?
4. Fair enough: but you concede that DWW is a journalist and not an 'important climatologist' as earlier suggested.
5. Sorry, I tend to agree more with James Dellingpole who argues brainwashed children have nothing of any import to teach us on climate change:
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/02/15/kids-climate-march-why-arent-they-in-school/
6. As I tried to make clear, philosophers are like little maggots of corruption; they worm their way into the apple, eat their way through both the soft flesh and hard core, then emerge on the other side, blinking in the sunlight ... That's why they can't be loyal members of any political party, or belong to any church.