Thursday, January 27, 2005
(5:05 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Whatever happened to the environment?
Those of you who are my age: remember back in junior high and high school, when people talked about the environment, when municipal recycling programs got really big, when Captain Planet reached 200 million households a day? What happened?I had a long discussion -- or argument -- last night with Lauren that touched on the environment. She argued that our technology had gotten way out of hand, that our objectifying relationship to the earth as a natural resource that we assume is simply inexhaustible is a root cause of that technological degradation, and that we need to come up with new ways of thinking (about God, about ourselves, about our supposed distinctiveness from nature) that would help to reverse the habits that got us into this situation in the first place. To my knowledge, she has never done much study of Heidegger, but her views were remarkably similar to Badiou's summary of Heidegger in Manifeste pour la philosophie.
I won't flatter myself by saying that my opinion, such as it was -- which was formulated on the spot, as a mere reaction to a set of ideas that I had heard somewhere before and found unconvincing, without anything in particular to put in its place -- were identical to Badiou's in any way. I was, however, deeply amused by Badiou's response to Heidegger's technophobia: «Messieurs les techniciens, encore une effort si vous voulez vraiment le règne planétaire de la technique!» ("Honored technologists, try a little harder if you really desire the worldwide reign of technology!") He points out something we've all thought: although technology has admittedly advanced a great deal, it still sucks. I am reminded of the scene in Last Night where the main character, facing the end of the world, expatiates at great length on the fact that car design let us down, that the world was going to end without any really cool car being invented. The problem, Badiou says, is not technology, but the worldwide reign of capital. Capital actually constrains technological development -- I extrapolate from Badiou's insight that the reason technology has ruined the environment isn't because of the values of technology per se, but the values of capitalism. The reason clean technology hasn't been developed and more hasn't been invested in cleaning up existing messes is that capitalism is inherently conservative; having found one means of extracting profit, capitalists will keep at it until it becomes painfully obvious that that flow of capital is no longer going to flow. Extracting oil from the ground and driving inefficient cars turns out to be a pretty effective way of generating profit, whereas any other technology is going to require a great deal of investment and a high degree of risk (to profit) -- so why not just stick to what we know?
I suggested to Lauren -- who said that if humanity would just disappear, the earth would recover and return to some kind of balance -- that maybe we've gone beyond a certain tipping point, such that we humans have fucked things up so badly that further technological advancement is the only hope, that if all of humanity suddenly disappeared today, life could continue in only a very impoverished state (the reign of cockroaches and rats!). Again, this was just a conjecture based on no evidence, but it seemed at least possible -- I do have a preference for the human race not to die out and do believe that I have a greater moral obligation to my fellow humans than to members of other species, so maybe my suggestion was just a last-ditch effort to make humanity's existence a potential asset.
So here, I formulate the position that I couldn't come up with in conversation: The logic that needs to be replaced is not necessarily the logic of divine transcendance (in order to put the divine into the created world and hopefully produce greater "respect" for the created world), nor the logic whereby human beings are qualitatively different from and more valuable than any other living or inanimate thing, nor even the logic whereby the "natural world" becomes a resource that we can shape and use -- the core problem is the logic of capitalism, the reign of surplus value. If we weren't so devoted to the nihilistic accumulation of capital, then we could direct the enormous energy and potential of human reason, human labor, human desire, toward the end of making the world a place in which life can proliferate in ever greater ways -- that is the nodal point that we must break through, and the way through is forward, with more and better technology, with more and better reason.
I have no idea how to implement these ideas, however.
UPDATE: This article wasn't directed toward this post, but I guess I must be a doctrinaire Marxist more concerned with maintaining some out-of-date theory than with actually stopping oppression. (Via Socialism in an Age of Waiting.) Also, one might ask: Am I, with my vulgar Marxist fundamentalism, as bad as those theorists of cyber-politics who stopped reading political theory shortly after the Federalist Papers?
