Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

"This book’s hard to classify. It’s by the philosopher-sociologist-theorist, Bruno Latour. Latour was not one of my favourite thinkers before I read this book. I‘ve found him an interesting person to engage with, in person, and to read in the past, but I rarely found myself really agreeing with him very much. But this book has changed all of that. The title is translated from the French—a better translation would be A Place to Land . Où Atterrir? (Where to come down to earth? or: Where to land? ) It’s that idea of where to come down, of finding a place to land, that’s missing from the English version. Here’s a quotation from the book that I actually use as an epigraph in my book, Parents For a Future where Latour is explaining the sense in which he means the title—especially the French title: “Do we continue to nourish dreams of escaping, or do we start seeking a territory that we and our children can inhabit? Either we deny the existence of the problem, or else we look for a place to land. From now on, this is what divides us all, much more than our position on the right or the left side of the political spectrum.” That’s one of the things that really interests me in the book. Latour argues—and this is very interesting coming from a French person again—that it is widely but unwisely taken for granted in political philosophy and in actual politics that the division between left and right is the meaningful and central divide. Like Latour, I don’t deny that it still has some relevance. But what I’d argue, and what I find very convincing in Latour’s book, is that a more important divide now is the divide between those who essentially put their faith in technology and who think we can we can build a more anthropocentric Earth, or indeed escape from Earth altogether, or escape from our bodies—essentially it’s the same idea, transhumanism —and those who don’t think that, and who instead think that in some fundamental sense we need to go back to our nature as Earthlings, who think we need, in some sense, to go back to the land. We need to find a place to land, we need to re-associate ourselves with places, and we need to re-integrate ourselves with the land-base. You might see a kind of connection here, going back to the books we talked about at the start of this discussion. And I think that’s right. On the left, you have people like the advocates of so-called fully-automated-luxury-communism, and on the right you have those peculiar characters in California who hope to have their minds uploaded to computers to achieve immortality. But what they have in common is that they’re not interested in finding a place to land, they’re interested rather in escaping from our earthly nature, or escaping from the earth altogether. And I think Latour is proposing here a really helpful way of re-conceiving our politics and ourselves, a way that exposes the dangerous parallel between the right- and left- reality-deniers. Latour thinks that the very widespread idea of some kind of cosmopolitanism, which I find almost ubiquitous in academia, the very widespread and supposedly obviously good idea that we’re fundamentally ‘citizens of the world’, that that actually can only at the very most tell half the story. “We also need to attach ourselves,” as he puts it, “to a particular patch of soil.” We have to re-root ourselves, as Simone Weil might have put it. We have to get serious about place about place mattering and not just space or the entire globe. And I think this is this is right, and a helpful move. I find the Pinkerian alternative deeply unconvincing. Let me briefly sketch why. Pinker has had very strong, devastating arguments made against him by people such as Ed Herman from the left, and by Nassim Taleb . It’s really important to take into account that it’s arguably quite lucky that we are even where we are. By which I mean, for example, there’s quite good reason to believe that we’re lucky not to have sunk our civilisation already. Plain lucky in particular not to have had nuclear war, massive nuclear war, over the last 70 years. Now, if you’re in the good position that you’re in simply as a matter of luck, then that really isn’t a very good basis for any kind of faith in ongoing progress. And if you do have that… faith, then, surprisingly, the word ‘faith’ really is relevant here. I think that this is a kind of faith-based approach. It’s not based on rationality, it’s not based on reliable evidence. I would argue that the only sane thing to do now—and this, I think is the key message of eco-philosophy as I’ve been trying to understand it or expound it—is to start to roll back somewhat in the kind of direction that Latour is pointing to. But remember, the interesting thing about Latour is that he’s not simply saying something like, ‘Let’s go back to the local, let’s go back to the past.’ He wants to maintain an idea of having access to the global world. I think this is very attractive, too. Let me give an example. You mentioned the internet earlier. It seems to me that a very attractive possible scenario for the future of humankind, if we’re going to survive, is we try to re-root ourselves: we get serious about place, we get serious about the land again, with many more of us working on the land a lot more, starting with those who already want to but in various ways are prevented from doing so by poor institutional arrangements. But, on the scenario I hope for, we don’t simply dispense with our global communications. On the contrary, we actually deliberately keep global communications open, so that we can continue to communicate with each other, so that we can continue to learn from each other, so that we can avoid atavism; and so that we can deal with coordination on worldwide problems such as pandemics or, or the climate itself. And I think that that shows, there’s no inherent contradiction between these two. We can have a future which is both global and much more seriously, local. Our world can be the best of both these worlds. That I think is a genuinely attractive vision for the future because, of course, there are many people who are not attracted by pure globalism or cosmopolitanism, but who want nevertheless to maintain the best of what we have, while actually having a way of life which is far more rooted, knowing their neighbours, having more security. I think it’s still not too late to combine these; but it will be too late soon. We’ll probably soon be committed to some kind of collapse scenario, in my opinion, tragically, unless we aim seriously for the kind of alternative that is sketched in the most intriguing way in Latour’s book. Why is that, though? I would argue that one of the key reasons is that many of these places have been destroyed by forces that were not from that place. And this is one of the key reasons why we need to do a lot of re-localisation. Because, when you’re dependent upon long supply lines, when you’re dependent on decisions made by CEOs, or investors, or prime ministers, who live 1,000s of miles away, then it’s hard for you to maintain and be fully ‘invested’ in where you live. What’s the best way typically to have people living in places that are not polluted and destroyed? It’s to let them have power over those places, and for them not to be dependent upon the whims of human beings who don’t have their interests at heart, and who can’t necessarily see the damage that they’re doing. When we buy products from China, we can’t easily see the damage that we’re doing. If our supply lines were far more local and much shorter, if we were much more rooted, then it would be far more difficult to avoid facing the consequences of what we do and how we live. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But that’s what I think is hopeful again, about Latour’s vision. He’s saying, ‘Let’s not go back to some kind of pure nativism/atavism/nationalism. But let’s get serious about re-localisation. Let’s get serious about roots, let’s get serious about place. And let’s find a way in which we can combine that with retaining the best of the global’, which, in my opinion, clearly includes trade where it’s necessary. Bananas would be a stereotypical example. I don’t want to give up bananas. They should come on a boat, for a long time to come. But I don’t think it’s a good idea that that all of my computers are made in China. And I want to be able to carry on communicating with people around the world. But I also want communities to be more genuine for people—for people to know their neighbours, for people not to rush around commuting so much and holidaying endlessly in distant locations. Of course, the pandemic is interesting here. Covid-19 may be the turning point. It may be the point at which globalisation and cosmopolitanism start to go into reverse. And what I’m saying is that, if we make that change in the right manner, that could be a good thing. If we don’t do it in a sort of simplistic globalisation-was-all-terrible kind of way. What if we thought carefully about what the good bits of industrialisation are, and the bad bits? What if we did the same with globalisation? It seems to me that making possible that kind of thinking is precisely the kind of thing that philosophers nowadays ought to be doing."