At the conclusion of his recent book Changing the Subject, the philosopher Raymond Geuss has suggested that much of what has seemed to be most alive and thought-provoking about philosophy shall soon be a thing of the past. For Geuss what has seemed of enduring value in philosophy is its capacity to distance itself from the world in which it arises and to reflect upon that world. Philosophy has various routes of reflection, most centrally those of analysis, that is, uncovering its central and often latent ideologies and testing them for cogency and coherence; Socrates opened this route with “his practice of using ratiocination (consisting of dialectical questioning and response) to seek self knowledge and also a knowledge of what human life was best.” (p.295) Another route is that of genealogy as practiced by Nietzsche, that is, excavating something of the conceptual history of a society’s ideologies, beliefs, and assumption through histories of the contingent links in the chain of conceptual, linguistic, and/or practical ancestors of today’s ideologies. And there is the route of practical imagination, “a minority view” that treats our world “as an inherently malleable domain and which construes philosophy as a way of seeking to change the world so as to make it more satisfactory.” (p. 299) Now one indication that philosophy is over is the fact, if it is one, that there are no thinkers in the past half-century who strike many of us as of the stature of thinkers from Socrates through Wittgenstein and Heidegger. But also, as the ways of philosophy depend, as Aristotle suggested, upon leisure and a sense of freedom from practically pressing issues, we recognize that we don’t have such leisure or such freedom; and we imagine that within a generation or two there shall be even less. The reason for this, we imagine, is the coming intensity of climate change, along with a host of other near-certain eventualities: the intensification of the on-going extinction of species, crucially of insects and pollinators; desertification; the likelihood of pandemics; the possibility of nuclear warfare. Once human beings are forced to treat these as the central features of their lives, so Geuss suggests, there will be little interest in reflecting upon, for example, whether Heidegger was right to think that ‘care’ is an ineliminable characteristic of Dasein or whether now a global attitude of ‘letting-be’ is most appropriate for us. (p. 249)
I suspect that Geuss would agree that one topic for philosophy in these times of imminent ecological apocalypse that adopts the minority approach of exercising practical imagination would be the apocalypse itself. While a contemplative approach might use the topic as an occasion to extend say a bit, say, recent thinking on our alleged debt to future generation, a practical approach would address whether there might be ways of individual and collective thinking and individual and collective action that might mitigate our crisis or help us think of ways of coping with climate change and ecological collapse. The most recent major contribution to this imaginative philosophy known to me is this little book This Civilisation is Finished (2019). The book is presented as a discussion between Samuel Alexander (a fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, not the formidable author a hundred years ago of Space, Time, and Deity) and Rupert Read, a philosopher at the University of East Anglia who in the past decade has supplemented his earlier professional focus on Wittgenstein with philosophical, educational, and political activity on the issue of the coming ecological collapse. Most of the book has Alexander in the role of questioner and Read in that of respondent, and so my short summary of the book will be of Read’s views.
At the basis of the book is the diagnosis given in the title: this civilization of ours is finished as a conceptual matter, and the coming ecological catastrophe will finish it as a practical matter. For Read our civilization is characterized firstly by an enormously intricate set of institutions and practices oriented towards technological development and economic profit, and secondly by a set of ideologies propounding two closely connected values, (a) economic and technological growth, and (b) production, especially of commodities. The reason that our civilization, so characterized, is ‘finished’ is that on our best understanding we have reached the limits, and indeed our now going beyond them, of the earth’s capacity to sustain development and profit. The effect of going beyond these limits is that the biological bases of our civilization are collapsing with climate change, desertification and loss of topsoil, destruction of forests, and mass extinctions, especially of insects and pollinators. Because, soberly considered, our civilization as such cannot continue for more than another generation or two, we must think that there are three possible scenarios for human life on earth in the next half century or so: ‘complete collapse, extinction or near-extinction of human life; some sort of new civilization arising from ‘seeds’ that are already present in our current civilization or that we introduce in the few years remaining before collapse; or a radical and rapid transformation of our current civilization into something that allows us to avoid ecological catastrophe. (p. 4; also p. 54 and p. 57) With regard to the first possibility, there is little for the philosophical imagination: one can only wish well those species that, unlike human beings, survive the global ecological collapse. Consideration of the third possibility, that of a rapid, civilization-saving transformation, immediately raises the question of what sort of transformations would be required. Read is at pains to deny the likelihood that the right sort of transformation would involve new kinds and instances of geo-engineering (pp.12-14), or high technology, such as mirrors in space (p. 15). Such transformations would require global implementation for their effectiveness to be so much as barely possible. But the risk, Read thinks, of unintended consequences is enormously high, and so likewise is the use of new kinds of high-technology in the event say the rise of sea levels inundating a nuclear power plant, or of a failure of the electric grid powering mirrors or cooling machinery. So if the third possibility is indeed a possibility, there must be other relevant sorts of transformation. Read thinks that such transformations are governed by “the fundamental logic of precaution. The logic of the ‘via negativa’: do less rather than always more; seek to facilitate resilient ‘anti-fragile’ systems; switch the burden of proof, such that anyone wanting to do something radically new needs to provide evidence that what they propose is safe” (pp. 14-15). Is this not the ethics of the fatalist?
Not so, according to Read. The governing principle of the third possibility is not ‘do nothing’, but rather ‘do less’. If there is a possibility of sustaining our current civilization, it will require a collective renunciation of new technologies, except those meeting the strictest criteria of sustainability, and a collective abandonment of the ideology and associated, deeply-entrenched practices oriented towards economic profit and growth. Here Read reverts to conceptual models familiar since the 1980’s: Duane Elgin’s call for ‘voluntary simplicity’, and Ivan Illich’s proposal for ‘conviviality’ as the most fundamental criterion for evaluating our technologies. Read notes, rightly in my view, that such a collective re-orientation implied in the adoption of such ideals would be and is attractive even if there were no coming ecological catastrophe. “Growthism”, that is, the ideology that ever-increasing economic development and production are somehow central features of the good life for human beings, “tends towards deadliness” (p. 55) under any circumstances. But it seems to me that, on Read’s own account, one surprising implication of this consideration of the third possibility is that it really is not a possibility at all. For Read has characterized our civilization as precisely that which is identified by the ideologies of growth and development, so to abandon those ideologies would be to bring that civilization to an end. If that’s right, then the only possibility for continued human civilization is that suggested in the second possibility, that is, that something new might emerge from ‘seeds’ of the present or near-future. What are these?
The seeds invoked in the second possibility are necessarily local. They must first of all be ‘islands of survivability’, some region that is sustainable even under conditions of global ecological collapse. But also, as models for a future civilization, the must offer the possibility of being scaled up. (p. 72) From what is presented in the book, it is hard to explicate these criteria in any detail, but the seeds surely include the sort of ‘re-wilding,’ advocated prominently by George Monbiot, that would tend to produce ‘anti-fragile’ ecosystems. Likewise it would include the development of towns situated with regions of wild and agricultural land providing sufficient spiritual and nutritional resources to sustain the town’s population.
In terms of practically-oriented philosophical imagination, then, Read’s second and third possibilities collapse into one: our civilization, to the degree that it is bound to ‘growthism’, is indeed finished. If there is something left for philosophy in this area, it will be in large part imagining and reflecting upon new forms of conviviality and re-wilding.
References:
Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity (1981) Raymond Geuss, Changing the Subject (2017) Ivan Illich, Tools For Conviviality (1973) George Monbiot, Feral: rewilding the land, the sea, and human life (2014) Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander, This Civilisation is Finished (2019)