U.S. Intellectual History Blog

How Different a Different Imaginary?

Mr. Burns blocks out the sun.

Marge may be the moral center of The Simpsons, but surely Lisa represents its active conscience. We have some chuckles at her expense when she moves into the tree to save it from logging. They are the tribute cynicism pays to sincerity.

Mr. Burns sits at the other end of this spectrum, and there the laughs are more satisfying. I’m not sure I’ve laughed more cathartically as when he contrived to block out the sun. Still, I’m not the first to note that Mr. Burns might have been onto something with his giant, sun-blocking device. Today’s geoengineers are proposing to seed the atmosphere with reflective bits of something or other, not to block the sun’s rays but to mirror back some of their light and heat.

In terms of ecological thought, as in much else, Lisa and Mr. Burns represent responses in polar opposition. But I’ll bet Lisa, who respects science and its technological legacy, and who in fact rightfully credits science with her understanding of human-caused climate change, might be willing to listen to the reflective bits idea. Others would urge her to stay up in the tree.

This is all to introduce, rather roughly and garishly, an essential point of contention in ecological thought demonstrated in two recently published articles. One, Peter Frase’s “By Any Means Necessary”  appeared last August in Jacobin. The other, from The New York Times a few weeks back, is “The Climate Crisis? It’s Capitalism, Stupid,” by Benjamin Y. Fong.

The point of contention I’m talking about might be summarized this way: What will it take to face our climate crisis, wholesale systemic change or a more enlightened, robust, and inclusive program of techniques–including those of geoengineering?

To be fair, both Frase and Fong are leftist critical scholars endeavoring to imagine a socially equitable, post-capitalist world. But within the immense difficulty of that project, old debates emerge. Because capitalism’s framing premises are the source of the climate crisis, Fong believes there are no piecemeal ways to deal with the magnitude of the threat. “It’s systemic change or bust,” he says.

Although he shares Fong’s etiology for climate change, Frase urges the Left to be more flexible in contemplating solutions. Certainly, rapid decarbonization is necessary, but the potential for remedies in geoengineering should not be dismissed out of hand. Human beings have long been in the geoengineering business, Frase argues, at least since the agricultural revolution. To think we can suddenly change our ways and wait for the natural world to find its way back to some human-friendly homeostasis is not merely naïve, Frase claims; it’s bad natural history.

Students of American history won’t miss the provocation in the title of Frase’s article. “By Any Means Necessary” deliberately recalls the contrast Malcom X drew between the commitment to non-violent protest associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., and his own endorsement of greater militancy. Accordingly, Frase’s argument rests on the same realism used against pacifists in the civil rights realm or elsewhere. If good-thinking people sit out even a discussion of geoengineering, Frase warns, the field will be left open not only to “unaccountable private actors” but to “the apparatus of global neo-liberal government.” Forgoing action for moral reasons, in other words, amounts to surrendering to those who are unafraid to act. Action must be met with action, strength with strength.

These are compelling arguments. Less compelling is the way Frase sets up the problem in his first few paragraphs. The kind of apocalyptic warnings that support the call for systemic change are old hat, he charges, mere grist for the “mill of green moralizing.” Furthermore, they make “it is easy to abandon hope that political institutions can address the crisis in the time-scale it demands.” We need a “different political imaginary,” Frase says.

Lisa contemplates systemic change.

One might counter that the call for systemic change like the kind Fong makes is by definition a call for a different imaginary. That’s what makes it so frustrating and disturbing, so impossible-seeming, and such a target for ridicule. Maybe apocalyptic warnings are familiar to us now. But at least as familiar is the defensive character of the response to these warnings: their association with religiosity and scolding moralism; the charge that they only encourage hopelessness; the charge that systemic change is unrealistic. It seems to me that the critique on grounds of realism is the clearest sign of all that Frase is not offering a different imaginary but defending the old and dominant imaginary once again.

We might label that imaginary “liberal” or “modern”: it imagines that the key to human progress is the application of intelligence by agents free of received ideas and political oppression. Fong summarizes this as the dream that “intelligence will save us.” “The intelligence of the brightest people around,” he also states, “is no match for the rampant stupidity of capitalism.”

Fong doesn’t elaborate on what he thinks is stupid about capitalism in this brief article. He does mention in passing its “progressive nature.” In the recent book, The Patterning Instinct, Jeremy Lent uses a more descriptive term: “the self-accelerating treadmill of perpetual growth.” Lent shows how many aspects of late capitalism enact a Sorcerer’s Apprentice scenario: the insatiability of want and the planned obsolescence that support consumerism; the demand that corporations maximize returns on investment; the requirement for money to grow in order to insure its future value; the imperative, therefore, to progressively monetize all aspects of human existence. Gun violence and climate change are two more contemporary examples of positive feedback loops in runaway.

These are the systemic aspects of a systemic problem. Therefore, Fong argues, it does no good to blame individuals or even corporations for our predicament. “It is the system as a whole that is at fault.” Lisa Simpson would likely agree with that conclusion. But what can it possibly mean to say that the whole system is at fault and that intelligence can’t save us? What do we have but intelligence to intervene in conditions and to have some say over our fates? Such thinking seems to lead into the hopeless paralysis that Frase describes.

In the face of that paralysis Frase counsels – what else? More doing. Yes, we must decarbonize immediately, strike protests in trees, presumably, and we need to plan for geoengineering projects, as well. Frase’s “all of the above” approach echoes the way Obama articulated the need to fuel a stagnant economy in the aftermath of the 2007 collapse without ignoring climate change.

As commonsensical as this pragmatism is, it can be boiled down to the following: Why fool ourselves? This is who we are. We must keep doing because doing is what we’ve always done. If it hasn’t worked before, it still might work this time, if we can only do better and in greater amounts.

I might direct your attention, at this point, to the paragraph above about the loops.

There is an understandable impatience with certain aspects of ecological thinking: its catastrophism, its moralism, its seeming gestures toward new age mysticism. We may be at the point, however, where the get-real response is the one more threaded with magical thinking.

Note: Peter Frase is an editor at and frequent contributor to Jacobin and the author of Four Futures (Verso, 2016), a smart book that gamely speculates on what might be expected in a post-capitalist, post-climate-changed world. It’s a useful book, brief enough and straightforward enough to be used on a course syllabus. Benjamin Fong is the author of the recent Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia, 2016). I haven’t read Fong’s book, but it’s now on my list.

9 Thoughts on this Post

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  1. Geoengineering? Like how we moved animals around the world and watched them go hog-wild (sometimes literally) in new environments?

    Absolutely not.

    And, kind of sad that Jacobin, though it’s not as far left as it is sometimes taken to be, would run a piece like that.

    Geoengineering is just another installation of tech-neoliberal “solutionism,” as Evgeny Morozov would call it. So, Frase is either clueless or strawmanning.

    I would rather do nothing than take the risk of geoengineering, to boot.

    As for Fong? The only “progressive” solution within a capitalist model is a carbon tax PLUS a carbon tariff, which the WTO allows.

    The rest of his piece sounds as silly as Frase’s.

    If these two are allegedly “leftist,” save me indeed from anybody to their right.

  2. This was an excellent read, Anthony.

    I have not looked at the essays by Fong and Frase (yet), so forgive me if the following thoughts are totally off the mark.

    I can’t help but wonder if Frase’s pragmatism entails something beyond a methodological flexibility. The willingness to join the more radical components of environmentalism with a sort of no nonsense realism could be indicative of a very robust set of commitments — of a very different (and perhaps radical) imaginary.

    Generally I am hesitant to take geoengineering seriously. Like many others, I believe it is emblematic of the same hubris and blind faith in technology that have made humans such a destructive force in the environment.

    In some moments, however, I find myself thinking differently. Maybe there is room in Frase’s position for a more radical pragmatism.

    If one buys Kevin Laland’s (or similar theorists) idea that nature and culture coevolve as humans participate in more and more complex forms of niche construction, then human agency plays a unique role in the environment — we are neither master nor passive observer of the natural world. We have evolved a unique responsibility for shaping the processes in which we take part. In this view, geoengineering suggests more than a simple managerial approach to environmental problems. Instead, it hints at an important recognition of the profound sense of responsibility that is now confronting humanity.

  3. I haven’t read the two pieces (Frase and Fong), but “systemic change or bust,” especially if the meaning of systemic change is not well detailed or specified, is not a hopeful counsel for those in the most vulnerable parts of the world, e.g. coastal areas of both poor and rich countries, who will be most directly affected by climate change in the short to medium run.

    I sometimes wonder whether a technologically-oriented civilization might have a built-in pendulum mechanism such that, when the dysfunctional feedback loops become completely intolerable, they stop operating at a point just short of societal collapse. A concrete micro-example might be: Does there come a point at which people’s devotion to their cars is at last overwhelmed by the realization that wasting 10 percent (or whatever) of one’s total lifespan sitting in congested traffic is not worth it? And if so, how do individual realizations of that kind coalesce into an effective mass political movement?

    Finally, those who have a taste for theory and sophisticated or even arguably brilliant speculation (such as, to take one slightly non-random example, A. Wendt’s Quantum Mind and Social Science, which I’ve lately been dipping into), might find more ways to connect their interests with those of people who are steeped in the details of social problems. If that sounds technocratic, so be it. A book, no matter how brilliant, on, for instance, psychoanalytic drive theory (Fong) is not going to prevent the premature heat-death of the planet.

  4. The comments above offer smart points of nuance to a schematic presentation. I’ll wager Peter Frase would appreciate the way Daniel Rinn articulates a “more radical pragmatism.”

    Frase, as another commenter suggests, does take part in some straw-manning. Few who have thought ecologically since the 70s would endorse a view of nature as a balanced and unchanging garden of Eden which we human beings disrupt. On the other hand, I find it interesting that the more we, as late capitalists, seem to be caught up in capitalism’s self-reinforcing and accelerating feedback loops, the more folks want to depict nature as “characterized by constant change and mass extinctions,” as Frase puts it. It is as if nature has come to resemble creative destruction writ large.

    As for the gentle and called-for pushings back against Fong’s position (as I presented it): I can’t say Fong’s piece is useless or silly, but it is very short. Its sets out only to make the basic point that there is no solution within the capitalist system. It does nothing in the way of imaging an alternative. Can we imagine *ourselves* and our lives outside a growth-dependent economic system? That’s the challenge. Who knows what will prove to be productive in that endeavor? Therefore I wouldn’t rule out, as unlikely as it sounds, the worth of a book about Freudian death drive theory.

  5. I think you’re right. Most of my denialist friends now concede that “climate changes,” and insist they never claimed it didn’t.

    And, if there’s anything to your speculation about the large correspondences in how we think of nature, society and ourselves, a book about death drive might be just what the times call for – even if we achieve 4% growth!

  6. I didn’t mean to suggest that Fong’s book is not worth reading and I’ll retract any implicit suggestion to that effect.

    I’m aware there’s been some work on ‘steady-state economics’, which presumably is relevant to parts of the OP and above discussion. (When I was still blogging a while back, I had a post that touched on it. However, don’t have time at the moment to look it up.)

    • Thank you, Louis. Understood. Steady-state economics are relevant as well as the fairly recent degrowth movement, which I hope to provide some information about in the coming weeks.

  7. I appreciate how you complicate the issues, Anthony. That said, I fall into an “all of the above” approach so long as our political leaders continue to DO NOTHING or worse, offer a GO BACKWARD approach (e.g. current admin). – TL

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