In the context of extractive industry, those that are water-intensive and fossil fuel-intensive, how can humanity rethink its relationship with the natural world against a backdrop of the deepening climate crisis? Do we need a radical reimagining of our collective responsibility?
Sometime in the 17th century, with the rise of capital, our attitudes towards nature changed. Sociologist Max Weber called it disenchantment. For centuries, people thought nature was sacralised, that it had the presence of divinity, and as a result of that presence, there was a natural respect that those who inhabited nature had towards nature. With the rise of modern science in the 17th Century, even though people still believed in God, God was sort of exiled from his presence in nature and put away, as Newton put him, outside, as a clockwinder outside the universe.
For centuries, human beings, when they took from nature, had elaborate rituals which showed respect and reciprocation towards nature, before cycles of planting, before cycles of hunting. That stopped sometime in the 17th Century. As a result of desacralisation, what we would call disenchantment, we then began to take from nature with impunity. It was a small step towards equating the very idea of nature with the idea of natural resources.
Capital played a role in making that equation, and we’re living with that equation. So while everybody’s talking about the climate crisis, a lot of the talk has to do with human subjects being in danger because of the climate crisis. I don’t think that that should be the way we approach it. Of course, we should be concerned about our futures and our future generations and so on, but it’s not just that we should be concerned about the fact that we are in danger; we should be concerned also that we’ve endangered nature.
Nobody really talks of nature’s rights, except in some Latin American countries like Bolivia. They have started doing it because those countries have indigenous communities. Bolivia had a political leader in power who was from an indigenous community. That’s when you found in the mainstream of politics talk of nature’s rights in Bolivia, for the first time.
Our selves, our castes, our races, our sexual proclivities, all these get represented, but who’s going to represent nature? This has been a question—how to bring it into the political agenda, not just as something that is about our welfare, but nature’s well-being. And for that you need representation of nature, and politics has not figured out how to represent nature’s interests.
How can reinstating a sense of intrinsic value and meaning in nature reshape our environmental ethics and provide a foundation for more sustainable practices in an increasingly commodified world? Is such a re-enchantment even possible?
There’s no real acknowledgement from the mainstream of discourse, which is mostly liberal discourse, on whether you could ever solve this crisis without, in some sense, bringing an end to capitalism as we know it. One of the people I take seriously, Naomi Klein, has said repeatedly that you can’t really address this crisis unless you’re prepared to ask fundamental questions about capitalism—very deep and fundamental questions. Unless we bring some terminus to capitalism as we know it, we’re not going to solve this crisis.
The reason why so many people are looking to indigenous attitudes and communities is because those attitudes and communities still belong to a kind of pre-capitalist way of thinking.
In Bolivia, where nature has been given rights, the indigenous people have adapted to the conceptual vocabulary of rights. That’s one way of showing respect for nature, to give it rights, to have it represented in, say, a parliamentary representation. You can have nature being represented, of course, by human subjects, but representing nature’s interests.
This will not be represented unless there are people who get into climate activism, not just pressure groups and NGOs and in Parliament and so on, but do it on the street.
In the context of environmental protection, given the relationship between individual self-interest and collective harm, is there a philosophical framework that could help us break free from this dilemma and encourage cooperation for the greater ecological good?
It is what people call a collective action problem—how do individuals get motivated to think for the collective good. It is a sort of a multi-person prisoner’s dilemma, where individuals think they shouldn’t be cooperating because they can get away with a lot if they don’t cooperate.
People have this anxiety that if they pay the cost of cooperation, for instance, if they don’t overfish, or don’t run their air conditioning all day, or don’t overgraze, don’t over-cultivate, how do they know that others will do the same?
That’s the prisoner’s dilemma. I don’t know that you will cooperate, so why should I cooperate?
My view is that to have that anxiety is already to be alienated. If you’re an unalienated society, you don’t have that anxiety.
Gandhi once said, nobody in my ashram ever says what if I did the sweeping around where I live and, and other people didn’t do the sweeping to keep the ashram clean. They just take it for granted that everybody will do it. That is what it is to be unalienated.
Once, as a kid, I went for a walk with my father on Cuffe Parade. We saw a wallet with some rupees sticking out of it. My father stopped and asked, “Why should we not take this wallet?” I said we should take it.
He was irritated. I said, “If we don’t take it, somebody else will, so let’s take it.” He said something which was very strange to me then. He said, “If we don’t take it nobody else will take it.”
I had no idea what he was saying then, but when I now think about alienation, it’s exactly what I was saying about this anxiety. What if I cooperated and others didn’t? That rational anxiety is how modern economists think. Liberal economists think it’s rational to have that anxiety.
What my father was really saying was that you just take for granted that nobody will take the wallet. That only happens if you are unalienated. Marx said that in a capitalist society everybody’s alienated, so they do have this anxiety. That is the really deep point—that capitalism is an individualist ideology and it makes individualism into a rational achievement. What we need, and this is why Marx is still important, is to question that.
