بخش 3 فصل 4

Politics of Consumption

Just before dawn on April 14, 2018, a Saturday, a sixty-year-old man walked into Prospect Park in Brooklyn, gave himself a shower of gasoline, and lit himself on fire. Beside the body, near a circular patch of grass blackened by the flames, lay a note, handwritten: “I am David Buckel and I just killed myself by fire as a protest suicide,” it read. “I apologize to you for the mess.” It was a small mess; he had arranged a ring of soil to prevent the fire from spreading too far.

In a longer letter, typed, which he had also sent to the city’s newspapers, Buckel elaborated. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result—my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves….Pollution ravages our planet,” he wrote. “Our present grows more desperate, our future needs more than what we’ve been doing.” —

Americans know political suicide by self-immolation from the Vietnam era, when Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk repurposing a spiritual tradition of self-purification for contemporary protest, burned himself to death in Saigon. A few years later, the thirty-one-year-old Quaker Norman Morrison was inspired to do the same, outside the Pentagon, his one-year-old daughter beside him. One week after that, twenty-two-year-old Roger Allen LaPorte, a former seminarian and Catholic Worker, lit himself aflame outside the United Nations. We don’t like to think about it, but the tradition continues. In the United States, there have been six protests by self-immolation since 2014; in China, the gesture is even more common, particularly by opponents of the country’s Tibet policy, with twelve in the last three months of 2011 and twenty in the first three months of 2012 alone. And of course the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit vendor ignited the Arab Spring.

Buckel was a later-life environmental activist. He’d spent most of his career as a prominent gay-rights litigator, and his notes expressed two clear convictions: that the natural world had been made sick by industrial activity, and that much more than the average passersby in Prospect Park could appreciate must be done to halt, and ideally reverse, the damage. In the days after his suicide, it was the first of these which attracted the most attention—his death treated as an alarm, or a bellwether, marking some amorphous shift, perhaps in the health of the planet but certainly in the average Brooklynite’s perception of it. The second insight is more challenging—that the climate crisis demands political commitment well beyond the easy engagement of rhetorical sympathies, comfortable partisan tribalism, and ethical consumption.

It is a common charge against liberal environmentalists that they live hypocritically—eating meat, flying, and voting liberal without yet having purchased Teslas. But among the woke Left the inverted charge is just as often true: we navigate by a North Star of politics through our diets, our friendships, even our consumption of pop culture, but rarely make meaningful political noise about those causes that run against our own self-interest or sense of self as special—indeed enlightened. And so, in the coming years, divestment is likely to be just the first salvo in a moral arms race between universities, municipalities, and nations. Cities will compete to be the first to ban cars, to paint every single roof white, to produce all the agriculture eaten by residents in vertical farms that don’t require post-harvest transportation by automobile, railroad, or airplane. But liberal NIMBYism will still strut, too, as it did in 2018, when American voters in deep-blue Washington state rejected a carbon tax at the ballot box, and the worst French protests since the quasi-revolution of 1968 raged against a proposed gasoline tax. On perhaps no issue more than climate is that liberal posture of well-off enlightenment a defensive gesture: almost regardless of your politics or your consumption choices, the wealthier you are, the larger your carbon footprint.

But when critics of Al Gore compare his electricity use to that of the average Ugandan, they are not ultimately highlighting conspicuous and hypocritical personal consumption, however they mean to disparage him. Instead, they are calling attention to the structure of a political and economic order that not only permits the disparity but feeds and profits from it—this is what Thomas Piketty calls the “apparatus of justification.” And it justifies quite a lot. If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent. We won’t get there through the dietary choices of individuals, but through policy changes. In an age of personal politics, hypocrisy can look like a cardinal sin; but it can also articulate a public aspiration. Eating organic is nice, in other words, but if your goal is to save the climate your vote is much more important. Politics is a moral multiplier. And a perception of worldly sickness uncomplemented by political commitment gives us only “wellness.” —

It can be hard to take wellness seriously as a movement, at first, which may be why it has been the subject of so much derision over the past few years—SoulCycle, Goop, Moon Juice. But however manipulated by marketing consultants, and however dubious its claims to healthfulness, wellness also gives a clear name and shape to a growing perception even, or especially, among those wealthy enough to be insulated from the early assaults of climate change: that the contemporary world is toxic, and that to endure or thrive within it requires extraordinary measures of self-regulation and self-purification.

What has been called the “new New Age” arises from a similar intuition—that meditation, ayahuasca trips, crystals and Burning Man and microdosed LSD are all pathways to a world beckoning as purer, cleaner, more sustaining, and perhaps above all else, more whole. This purity arena is likely to expand, perhaps dramatically, as the climate continues to careen toward visible degradation—and consumers respond by trying to extract themselves from the sludge of the world however they can. It should not be a surprise to discover, in next year’s supermarket aisles, alongside labels for “organic” and “free range,” some food described as “carbon-free.” GMOs aren’t a sign of a sick planet but a possible partial solution to the coming crisis of agriculture; nuclear power the same for energy. But both have already become nearly as off-putting as carcinogens to the purity-minded, who are growing in number and channeling more and more ecological anxiety along the way.

That anxiety is coherent, even rational, at a time when it has been revealed that many American brand-name foods made from oats, including Cheerios and Quaker Oats, contain the pesticide Roundup, which has been linked with cancer, and when the National Weather Service issues elaborate guidance about which commonly available face masks can, and which cannot, protect you against the wildfire smoke engulfing nearly all of North America. It is only intuitive, in other words, that impulses toward purity represent growth areas of our culture, destined to distend further inward from the cultural periphery as apocalyptic ecological anxiety grows, too.

But conscious consumption and wellness are both cop-outs, arising from that basic promise extended by neoliberalism: that consumer choices can be a substitute for political action, advertising not just political identity but political virtue; that the mutual end-goal of market and political forces should be the effective retirement of contentious politics at the hand of market consensus, which would displace ideological dispute; and that, in the meantime, in the supermarket aisle or department store, one can do good for the world simply by buying well.

—

The term “neoliberalism” has been a swear word, on the Left, only since the Great Recession. Before then it was, most of the time, mere description: of the growing power of markets, particularly financial markets, in the liberal democracies of the West over the second half of the twentieth century; and of the hardening centrist consensus within those countries committed to spreading that power, in the form of privatization, deregulation, corporate-friendly tax policy, and the promotion of free trade.

This program was sold, for fifty years, on the promise of growth—and not just growth for some. In this way, it was a sort of total political philosophy, extending a single, simple ideological tarpaulin so far and wide that it enclosed the earth like a rubbery blanket of greenhouse gas.

It was total in other ways as well, unable to adjust to meaningfully discriminate between experiences as divergent as post-crash England and post-Maria Puerto Rico, or to concede its own shortcomings and paradoxes and blind spots, proposing instead only more neoliberalism. This is how the forces that unleashed climate change—namely, “the unchecked wisdom of the market”—were nevertheless presented as the forces that would save the planet from its ravages. It is how “philanthrocapitalism,” which seeks profits alongside human benefits, has replaced the loss-leader model of moral philanthropy among the very rich; how the winners of our increasingly winner-take-all tournament economy use philanthropy to buttress their own status; how “effective altruism,” which measures even not-for-profit charity by metrics of return borrowed from finance, has transformed the culture of giving well beyond the billionaire class; and how the “moral economy,” a rhetorical wedge that once expressed a radical critique of capitalism, became the calling card of do-gooder capitalists like Bill Gates. It is also, on the other end of the pecking order, how struggling citizens are asked to be entrepreneurs, indeed to demonstrate their value as citizens with the hard work of entrepreneurship, in an exhausting social system defined above all else by relentless competition.

That is the critique from the Left, at least—and it is, in its way, inarguably true. But by laundering all conflict and competition through the market, neoliberalism also proffered a new model of doing business, so to speak, on the world stage—one that didn’t emerge from, or point toward, endless nation-state rivalry.

One should not confuse correlation with causation, especially since there was so much tumult coming out of World War II that it is hard to isolate the single cause of just about anything. But the international cooperative order that has since presided, establishing or at least emerging in parallel with relative peace and abundant prosperity, is very neatly historically coincident with the reign of globalization and the empire of financial capital we now group together as neoliberalism. And if one were inclined to confuse correlation with causation, there is a quite intuitive and plausible theory connecting them. Markets may be problematic, shall we say, but they also value security and stability and, all else being equal, reliable economic growth. In the form of that growth, neoliberalism promised a reward for cooperation, effectively transforming, at least in theory, what had once been seen as zero-sum competitions into positive-sum collaborations.

Neoliberalism never made good on that bargain, as the financial crisis finally revealed. Which has left the rhetorical banner of an ever-expanding, ever-enriching society of affluence—and a political economy oriented toward the same goal—considerably tattered. Those continuing to hold it aloft are much wobblier at the knee than seemed credible to imagine just a decade or two ago, like athletes showing themselves suddenly far past their prime. Global warming promises another blow, possibly a lethal one. If Bangladesh floods and Russia profits, the result will not be good for the cause of neoliberalism—and arguably worse still for the cause of liberal internationalism, which has always been its aide-de-camp.

What kinds of politics are likely to evolve after the promise of growth recedes? A whole pantheon of possibilities floats before us, including that new trade deals are built on the moral infrastructure of climate change, with commerce contingent on emissions cuts and sanctions a punishment for squirrelly carbon behavior; or that a new global legal regime emerges, supplementing or perhaps even supplanting the central principle of human rights that has presided globally, at least in theory, since the end of World War II. But neoliberalism was sold on the proposition of positive-sum cooperation of all kinds, and the term itself suggests its natural successor regime: zero-sum politics. Today, we don’t even have to gaze into the future, or trust that it will be deformed by climate change, to see what that would look like. In the form of tribalism at home and nationalism abroad and terrorism flaming out from the tinder of failed states, that future is here, at least in preview, already. Now we just wait for the storms.

—

If neoliberalism is the god that failed on climate change, what juvenile gods will it spawn? This is the question taken up by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright in Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, in which they repurpose Thomas Hobbes to sketch out what they see as the likeliest political form to evolve from the crisis of warming and the pummeling of its impacts.

In his Leviathan, Hobbes narrated a false history of political consent to illustrate what he saw as the fundamental bargain of state power: the people giving up their liberty for the protection offered by a king. Global warming suggests the same bargain to would-be authoritarians: in a newly dangerous world, citizens will trade liberties for security and stability and some insurance against climate deprivation, ushering into being, Mann and Wainwright say, a new form of sovereignty to do battle against the new threat from the natural world. This new sovereignty will be not national but planetary—the only power that could plausibly answer a planetary threat.

Mann and Wainwright are leftists, and their book is in part a call-to-arms, but the planetary sovereign the world is likeliest to turn to, they say with regret, is the one that sold us climate change in the first place—that is, neoliberalism. In fact, a neoliberalism beyond neoliberalism, a true world-state concerned close-to-exclusively with the flow of capital—a preoccupation that may poorly equip it to deal with the damages and degradations of climate change, but at no real cost to its authority. This is the “Climate Leviathan” of the title, though the authors do not believe its success is inevitable. In fact, they see three variations as also possible. Altogether, the four categories make up a climate-future matrix, plotted along the axes of relative faith in capitalism (on the one hand) and degree of support for nation-state sovereignty (on the other).

“Climate Leviathan” is the quadrant defined by a positive relationship to capitalism and a negative perspective on national sovereignty. Something like our current situation they call the “Climate Behemoth” outcome, defined by mutual support for capitalism and for the nation-state: capitalism overruns the world’s borders to address the planetary crisis while protecting its own interests.

The next they call “Climate Mao,” a system defined by putatively benevolent but authoritarian and anti-capitalist leaders, exercising their authority within the borders of nations as they exist today.

The last quadrant: capitalistic nations conduct haphazard climate diplomacy—an international system negatively disposed toward both capitalism and the sovereignty of nation-states. This system would define itself as a guarantor of stability and security—ensuring at least a subsistence-level distribution of resources, protecting against the ravages of extreme climate events, and policing the inevitable outbreaks of conflict over the now-more-precious commodities of food, water, land. It would also wipe out entirely the borders between nations, recognizing only its own sovereignty and power. They call this possibility “Climate X,” and express great hope for it: a global alliance operating in the name of a common humanity, rather than in the interests of capital or nations. But there is a dark version as well—it is how you might get a planetary dictator in the shape of a mafia boss, and global governance not on the do-gooder model but as a straight-up protection racket.

In theory, at least. Already, it’s fair to say, we have at least two Climate Mao leaders out there, and both are imperfect avatars of the archetype: Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, neither of whom is anti-capitalist so much as state capitalist. They also hold very different perspectives on the climate future and how to reckon with it, which suggests another variable, beyond form of government: climate ideology. This is how Angela Merkel and Donald Trump, both operating within the “Climate Behemoth” system, can nevertheless seem so many worlds apart—though Germany’s slow walk on coal suggests there may not be full solar systems between them.

With China and Russia, the ideological contrast is clearer. Putin, the commandant of a petro-state that also happens to be, given its geography, one of the few nations on Earth likely to benefit from continued warming, sees basically no benefit to constraining carbon emissions or greening the economy—Russia’s or the world’s. Xi, now the leader-for-life of the planet’s rising superpower, seems to feel mutual obligations to the country’s growing prosperity and to the health and security of its people—of whom, it’s worth remembering, it has so many.

In the wake of Trump, China has become a much more emphatic—or at least louder—green energy leader. But the incentives do not necessarily suggest it will make good on that rhetoric. In 2018, an illuminating study was published comparing how much a country was likely to be burdened by the economic impacts of climate change to its responsibility for global warming, measured by carbon emissions. The fate of India showcased the moral logic of climate change at its most grotesque: expected to be, by far, the world’s most hard-hit country, shouldering nearly twice as much of the burden as the next nation, India’s share of climate burden was four times as high as its share of climate guilt. China is in the opposite situation, its share of guilt four times as high as its share of the burden. Which, unfortunately, means it may be tempted to slow-walk its green energy revolution. The United States, the study found, presented a case of eerie karmic balance: its expected climate damages matching almost precisely its share of global carbon emissions. Not to say either share is small; in fact, of all the nations in the world, the U.S. was predicted to be hit second hardest.

For decades, the rise of China has been an anxious prophecy invoked so regularly, and so prematurely, that Westerners, Americans especially, could be forgiven for thinking it was a case of the empire who cried wolf—an expression of Western self-doubt, more a premonition of collapse than a well-founded prediction of what new power might arise, and when. But on the matter of climate change, China does hold nearly all the cards. To the extent the world as a whole needs a stable climate to endure or thrive, its fate will be determined much more by the carbon trajectories of the developing world than by the course of the United States and Europe, where emissions have already flattened out and will likely begin their decline soon—though how dramatic a decline, and how soon, is very much up in the air. And although what’s called “carbon outsourcing” means that a large slice of China’s emissions is produced manufacturing goods to be consumed by Americans and Europeans. Whose responsibility are those gigatons of carbon? It may not much longer be merely a rhetorical question, if the Paris accords yield to a more rigorous global carbon governance structure, as they were intended to, and add, along the way, a proper enforcement mechanism, military or otherwise.

How and how fast China manages its own transition from industrial to postindustrial economy, how and how fast it “greens” the industry that remains, how and how fast it remodels agricultural practices and diet, how and how fast it steers the consumer preferences of its booming middle and upper classes away from carbon intensity—these are not the only things that will determine the climate shape of the twenty-first century. The courses taken by India and the rest of South Asia, Nigeria and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, matter enormously. But China is, at present, the largest of those nations, and by far the wealthiest and most powerful. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, the country has already positioned itself as a major provider, in some cases the major provider, of the infrastructure of industry, energy, and transportation in much of the rest of the developing world. And it is relatively easy to imagine, at the end of a Chinese century, an intuitive global consensus solidifying—that the country with the world’s largest economy (therefore most responsible for the energy output of the planet) and the most people (therefore most responsible for the public health and well-being of humanity) should have something more than narrowly national powers over the climate policy of the rest of the “community of nations,” who would fall into line behind it.

—

All of these scenarios, even the bleakest, presume some new political equilibrium. There is also, of course, the possibility of disequilibrium—or what you would normally call “disorder” and “conflict.” This is the analysis put forward by Harald Welzer, in Climate Wars, which predicts a “renaissance” of violent conflict in the decades to come. His evocative subtitle is What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century.

Already, in local spheres, political collapse is a quite common outcome of climate crisis—we just call it “civil war.” And we tend to analyze it ideologically—as we did in Darfur, in Syria, in Yemen. Those kinds of collapses are likely to remain technically “local” rather than truly “global,” though in a time of climate crisis they would have an easier time metastasizing beyond old borders than they have in the recent past. In other words, a completely Mad Max world is not around the bend, since even catastrophic climate change won’t undermine all political power—in fact, it will produce some winners, relatively speaking. Some of them with quite large armies and rapidly expanding surveillance states—China now pulls criminals out of pop concerts with facial recognition software and deploys domestic-spy drones indistinguishable from birds. This is not an aspiring empire likely to tolerate no-man’s-lands within its sphere.

Mad Max regions elsewhere are another matter. In certain ways they are already here, where “here” is parts of Somalia or Iraq or South Sudan at various points in the last decade, including points when the planet’s geopolitics seemed, at a glance from Los Angeles or London, stable. The idea of a “global order” has always been something of a fiction, or at least an aspiration, even as the joined forces of liberal internationalism, globalization, and American hegemony inched us toward it over the last century. Very probably, over the next century, climate change will reverse that course.