In the immediate wake of President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, Jed Purdy wrote at Dissent about the ironic possibility of Trump’s action forcing an overdue sense of emergency. Purdy sees in the agonized response to Trump’s announcement a sense that “Paris had come to stand, at least in liberals’ minds, for the thought that the world was bumping toward the right track, that someone out there was doing something about climate change.” For Purdy, though, the political constraints that shaped the Paris accord rendered it largely symbolic from the beginning, too weak by design to avert major climate disruptions. If the Paris Agreement already fell short of the global cooperation necessary to address climate change, what might such a movement look like? Below, in an excerpt from his 2015 book After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, Purdy sketches some of the parameters of how the world might democratically shape a way to make human and natural flourishing compatible—even as democracy itself intensifies the emergencies we face.
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Today democratic consent is the only widely accepted way to make political power legitimate, and for very good reasons. It expresses two critically important ideas: that power should not be exercised over people without their consent, and that all individuals should have equal voice in the question of consent—in saying yes or no to a law or a government. But democracy’s standing is less secure than this quick summary suggests. Widespread acceptance of democracy as the standard of political legitimacy can be thin and nominal: it is effectively universal, but not because of deep commitment. In fact, pieties about democracy are now under pressure from, and sometimes yielding to, technocratic government at the heart of the historically democratic world, such as Europe, and assertive authoritarianism in countries such as Russia and China. This newly evident fragility is a reminder that much of democracy’s seemingly universal triumph came from the failure and decline of alternatives, rather than from affirmative democratic success. Moreover, even democracy’s thin universality is novel, a mere wrinkle in history. Less than a century ago, it was common to say that democracies were weak, enervating, feckless, and that stronger, more demanding forms of government must rise to replace them. The romance of authoritarianism was a major theme of the twentieth century, with fascism being only the most indelible instance, and it would be complacent to suppose that the romance will not return. Not all of its variants are revolutionary; indeed, some of the most important today are technocratic and distinctly conservative in their relation to the existing order of power and authority.
Disgust with democracy grows where democracy palpably fails, and failure has recently seemed to be its specialty. Here we return to the ironic awkwardness of calling for more democracy when democracy seems a formula for failure. Today’s American voters, the country’s political parties, and the government they form are unlikely to strike anyone as the source of attractive answers to the question: What kind of world shall we make together? In fact, their answer is already visible in the world we are making, and its drawbacks are evident. Whatever else it means, a call for deepened democracy had better not amount to “More of this, please!”
It will not do to raise pious calls for democracy just because democracy is abstractly a good thing. The Anthropocene question—what kind of world to make together—should be taken as a challenge to democracy. The test is whether citizens can form the kind of democracy that can address the Anthropocene question, the question of what kind of world to make. A democracy that cannot do this will have marked itself as inadequate to its most basic problems.
A commitment to democracy must not be a pious test of faith in a failing system. It must be a commitment to producing democratic politics that can meet these challenges, that can achieve strength and decisiveness of the most delicate kind: in favor of self-restraint.
To ask the question, “What kind of democracy?” means asking both “What kind of democracy could address the Anthropocene question?” and “What kind of democracy should we be trying to build?” The heart of the answer must be this: a democracy capable of self-restraint. But, ironically, democratic self-restraint can come only from democratic self-assertion: a political community must be able to act effectively and decisively on hard questions in order to commit to accepting certain limitations. The ultimate political challenge is to limit, together and legitimately, the scope of human appetites, so that we do not exhaust and undo the living world. Our demands must have their boundaries. The ultimate boundary, of course, is the survival of humankind; but that limit remains remote, in time and in imagination. Closer questions form the heart of the Anthropocene problem: the need for the limits that give the world some definite shape, some stability in its climate and seasons, some diversity in species and habitats and landscapes.
It is important to emphasize that no one really knows what a democracy on the scale of Anthropocene challenges—global in scope and deep in the reach of its unavoidably shaping relationship to the living world—would look like. To write of a “we,” a polity that could inhabit and constitute such a democracy, in the absence of the institutions and shared identities that would make it real, is to write fiction, imaginative literature. And such literature is unavoidably written from the perspective of someone in particular, who, with the leisure to step back and imagine a world that is nowhere near existing, is not very representative of the people who might eventually make up that polity. So a purblind fiction is the best one can do here. The thing is to hope that it is a productive fiction.
The way to make it productive is not to attempt a utopian blueprint of global Anthropocene democracy, but to name some attitudes that would bend toward it, while always keeping at the center of awareness the vast gap between the ideal of Anthropocene democracy and the very different present realities. Here are three of those attitudes. First is skepticism toward all those political approaches to the Anthropocene that patently flout a democratic future, that replace political and ethical judgment with expert technique, such as cost-benefit analysis, that conceals its political and ethical judgments and tends to hollow out, rather than expand, the ambition to make the choice of Anthropocene futures democratic. The same suspicion should be aimed at any way of shaping the planetary future that imposes one group’s vision willy-nilly on another, whether through explicit unilateralism (say, a program of geo-engineering launched from the United States or India) or by guiding decisions through a mechanism that gives vastly different world-shaping power to different populations. The neoliberal approach to the Anthropocene, which defines the regulation and shaping of nature as an economic problem best handled by markets, has just this problem: the currency it uses to select futures is the literal, and unequal, currency of economic wealth, rather than the adamantly equal currency of voting. None of this means that there may not be reason to accept and participate in environmental measures that have these limitations; but it is essential to insist that they are limitations, which cast doubt on the legitimacy of the world they produce, and to aim at overcoming them.
The second attitude is more active and constructive: to keep in view a picture, however loose-knit and utopian, of a world in which Anthropocene questions would be genuinely democratic. In that world, self-aware, collective engagement with the question of what kinds of landscapes, what kind of atmosphere and climate, and what kind of world-shaping habitation to pursue would all be parts of the repertoire of self-governance. Moral and political learning, or at least persuasion, would happen through decisions about future worlds and, in turn, the experience of living in those worlds. Even to write this feels utopian, in the pejorative sense, at a time when questions such as the very reality of climate change have become partisan footballs; but perhaps it is helpful to consider contrasting areas, such as gay rights in the United States, or recent historical moments, such as the emergence of modern environmental politics in the early 1970s, for examples of this kind of shared, world-changing progress. The need for this kind of progress is not in the least a guarantee of achieving it, of course; but it is the only alternative to half-conscious impositions of futures on one another and on our descendants. The result of an undemocratic Anthropocene is an inhumane world built on unfair terms. That would be nothing new, but the prospect of it is a reason to try to do better.
The third attitude is a bridging one, which seeks to connect the present state of things with the ideal of a democratic Anthropocene. This is an attitude of intense interest in every effort that brings some people, or many people, closer to a shared identity or compatible and overlapping identities, to a sense of solidarity, and to the political and institutional resources needed for directing that sense toward shaping future worlds. These efforts may be as concrete and political as climate activism or as concrete and personal as efforts to live a carbon-neutral life in concert with neighbors doing the same. They may be aesthetic efforts to imagine the beauty of the global atmosphere and see the qualities in a transformed landscape that can inspire attachment and stewardship. They may be theoretical efforts to specify ideas of a democratic Anthropocene more rigorously and exactly. All are as likely as not to be washed away, or at least transformed, by the flow of events, sidelong surprises, unforeseen initiatives and irruptions; but if they have inspired or provoked the latter, they will at least have lent something to the direction of change.
These are all ways to make the imaginative literature of an Anthropocene democracy serve as a productive fiction, and they are what I mean when I refer to “democracy” here. So, what kind of democracy? Part of the answer is a democracy less beholden to money than the current American one. To repeat: the role that money plays in American politics gives, in effect, louder voices and more votes to those who benefit from the present economy, with all its ecological harms, than to those who seek to change it. Reducing the power of money would ease—but only ease—the grip that the current, reckless economy has on politics.
The next version of the question, “What kind of democracy?” is more radical: How human-centered should democracy be? Recent political thought presents a series of calls to turn away from “humanism,” toward something we might called “post-humanism,” “ecocentrism,” a “new animism,” or a “politics of nature”—ways of thinking and acting in the world that would give a place to the nonhuman. One call is for leveling the hierarchical divide between human and nonhuman by blurring that boundary. We are less distinct from the rest of nature than we often imagine, the argument goes, and it rests on important and often-neglected facts. Much of our weight and metabolism is formed of other creatures, bacteria above all; we are not entities but ecologies. We are animals like others: bodily, appetitive, susceptible to pain. We are embedded in the technological ecologies we have made: we are cyborgs, acting through silicon and data, seeing through plastic or glass, moving like cells through transport networks, gleaning our meme-y thoughts from our cultures like the bacteria in our guts sharing DNA. Whether we think our way to the larger scale or the smaller one, whether we emphasize our organic composition or our artificial environments, the familiar human scale gives way easily, and so does the familiar thought that a human being is a solid, self-contained entity, unique in the world.
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Trying to build a peaceful and humane world means finding a way to live peaceably with nature, not just mining it for our convenience. Environmentalism, taken in its best light, is a reminder that our dominant versions of democracy, reason, and progress are still superficial, especially because they rely on ignoring or recklessly exploiting nature, and that, for these values to be sustainable, we must give them a sustainable relation to the larger living world.
A democracy open to post-human encounters with the living world would be more likely to find ways to restrain its demands and stop short of exhausting the planet. The history of environmental lawmaking suggests that people are best able to change their ways when they find two things at once in nature: something to fear, a threat they must avoid, and also something to love, a quality they can admire or respect, and which they can do their best to honor. The first impulse, of fear, can be rendered in purely human-centered terms, as a matter of avoiding environmental crisis. The second impulse, of love, engages animist intuitions and carries us toward post-humanism, which is perhaps just another name for an enriched humanism. Either impulse can stay the human hand, but the first stops it just short of being burnt or broken. The second keeps the hand poised, extended in greeting or in an offer of peace. This gesture is the beginning of collaboration, among people but also beyond us, in building our next home.