Eco-Apocalypse: It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

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.

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.

On the Practical Idealism and Pan-Europeanism of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi

Count Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi 

(1894-1972)

One of the reasons that I dislike crackpot conspiracy theories in which nothing is as it seems, nothing happens by accident, everything is connected and invariably involves either the Jews or extraterrestrials, is that they serve to distract from and disguise what is really going on in the world.

What's more - and worse - they discredit the very notion of orchestrated acts, planned and carried out in secret, by elite groups, with sinister or subversive aims. One is almost tempted to say that all the popular conspiracy theories are themselves part of a wider conspiracy and that people like David Icke are essentially useful idiots, rewarded with fame and fortune for the work they do.     

So it is that people know all about Icke himself, for example, and his shape-shifting reptilians, but very few have ever heard of Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi and his vision of a future Europe composed of a racially-mixed population ruled over by a politico-spiritual elite.

Coudenhove-Kalergi was one of the key early advocates of European integration and served as the founding president of the Pan-European Union for almost fifty years; a body that served as a prototype and ideological foundation for the EU as we know it today.     

Aristocratic by birth and temperament, Coudenhove-Kalergi nevertheless favoured social democracy over feudalism. His ambition, however, shaped by readings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Spengler and detailed in his own extensive writings from the 1920s onwards, was to oversee the creation an ultra-conservative, post-democratic Europe, in which the nation state was dissolved, but the continent united by a common cultural ideal.

Not surprisingly, his Pan-Europa project was despised by Hitler, who characterized Coudenhove-Kalergi as a rootless, cosmopolitan half-breed, supported by Jewish finance and under the influence of Freemasonry. And, indeed, Coudenhove-Kalergi continues to serve as a hate figure today for those on the far-right opposed to globalism and who understand the European migrant crisis as an attempt to destroy the racial foundations of Europe and eventually replace the native peoples with a new population made up of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Who understand the migrant crisis, in other words, as a crucial stage of the Kalergi Plan, as set out in Praktischer Idealismus (1925) and which predicts:

"Today's races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals."

Obviously, depending on one's politics, this can be viewed as either a utopian dream or a dystopian nightmare. But it's maybe something worth discussing seriously - and not quickly dismissed as just another mad conspiracy theory put forward by racist neo-Nazis et al ...