Pralaya (An Anticipatory Story) 1:4

SEASON 1, EPISODE 4

From Christopher L. Fici, Ph.D

From our manuscript (Julia and I). The ecotheology. 

The practice of anticipation and the creative formation of anticipatory community are by definition designed to reveal, confront, resist, and regenerate the fault lines of modernity. We are opening towards sovereign political exceptionalisms of the time of climate catastrophe from which totalitarianism can re-emerge fiercely and with a new and urgent appetite to protect its interests. We are simultaneously opening towards, within the spacetimemattering of climate catastrophe, an increased awareness of and potential for kairos (divine inbreaking) and metanoia (profound conversion) from which the art of anticipation will always emerge from and be nourished by.

The classic fascist call for blood and soil becomes even more antagonistically ecological within the contexts of our climate catastrophe. (11) As the contours of this catastrophe continue to intensify, a further drawing-in of the bridges of support and mutuality between human and human and human and other-than-human on microscopic and macroscopic scales mutates and metastasizes. This is creating conditions from which totalitarian and fascist forces can re-emerge in the twisted ecological key of climate catastrophe. How does the code of power respond to the pressures of the defiant Earth?

11 Brendan O’ Connor, “The Fascist Right is Bloodied and Soiled,” Splinter, published March 29, 2018, accessed at https://splinternews.com/the-fascist-right-is-bloodied-and-soiled-1824093337.

The contemporary philosopher Roy Scranton illustrates what this may look like:

“Imagine we’ve got twenty or thirty years before things really get bad. Imagine how that happens. Imagine soldiers putting you on a bus, imagine nine months in a FEMA trailer, imagine nine years in a temporary camp. Imagine watching the rich on the other side of the fence, the ones who can afford beef and gasoline, the ones who can afford clean water. Imagine your child growing up never knowing satiety, never knowing comfort, never knowing snow. Imagine politics in a world on fire.” (12)

12 Roy Scranton, We're Doomed, Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change, Kindle Location 651.

The totalitarian impulse in the time of climate catastrophe will focus on who is sustainable and who is expendable in a time of rapidly dwindling resources. The totalitarian impulse feeds on atomization and selfishness. The totalitarian impulse seeks the destruction of personality and creativity, and the communities which nurture personality and creativity. Climate totalitarianism will emerge in political contexts in which the impulse for security and stability will be desperately desired as a bulwark against the wicked precarities of our climate catastrophe. This impulse for security and stability will take precedence over contingent demands for justice and dignity. The totalitarian impulse preys on these selfish temptations to preserve the status-quo at all costs, especially when evidence of ecological collapse begins to physically intrude on the borders of security, survival, and quality-of-life. The totalitarian impulse feeds on loneliness, alienation, and uprootedness. 

The philosopher Hannah Arendt writes: 

“The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything—belief, honor, dignity—on the slightest provocation. Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives.” (13) 

The uprooted person within an uprooted social unit, such as the family or the nation-state, who is desperately clinging to the illusion that they are still rooted in these constructs, becomes dangerously receptive to the nihilistic impulses of the most powerful totalitarian temptations.

Totalitarianism, as Arendt further illustrates: 

“...bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man. Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government...is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down of political institutions and social traditions in our own time.” (14)

In a 5C or 6C warmer world, what happens to the communities who do not have the power and privilege to hoard what’s left?

13 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1968), 337

14 Ibid, 465

Our contemporary socio-political tremors and shocks concerning the number (and color) of refugees at the borderlines of Europe and the United States portend a potentially violent “solution” in response to what may be the most unsettling aspect of our climate catastrophe: the colossal number of people who have become, are becoming, and will become climate refugees. The journalist Christian Parenti reports that:

“…climate change will increase the number of people trying to enter the United States. Recall the estimates that by 2050 as many as 250 million to 1 billion people will be on the move due to climate change. Britain’s 2006 Stern Review estimated that by the latter half of this century, climate change will create 10 times the current number of refugees. In this context, the border becomes a text from which to read the future—or a version of it.” (15)

Politics in the time of climate catastrophe creates is what Parenti describes as the catastrophic convergence. The catastrophic convergence is the combustion of ecological and political pressures which occurs at the intensifying intersection of climate change, poverty, white supremacy, the dying but still handsy patriarchy, the rise of the uber-fascist tech gurus, etc.  

This also creates what Parenti describes as “the politics of the armed lifeboat.”  

“However, another type of political adaptation is already under way, one that might be called the politics of the armed lifeboat: responding to climate change by arming, excluding, forgetting, repressing, policing, and killing. One can imagine a green authoritarianism emerging in rich countries, while the climate crisis pushes the Third World into chaos. Already, as climate change fuels violence in the form of crime, repression, civil unrest, war, and even state collapse in the Global South, the North is responding with a new authoritarianism. The Pentagon and its European allies are actively planning a militarized adaptation, which emphasizes the long-term, open-ended containment of failed or failing states—counterinsurgency forever. This sort of “climate fascism,” a politics based on exclusion, segregation, and repression, is horrific and bound to fail. There must be another path. The struggling states of the Global South cannot collapse without eventually taking wealthy economies down with them. If climate change is allowed to destroy whole economies and nations, no amount of walls, guns, barbed wire, armed aerial drones, or permanently deployed mercenaries will be able to save one half of the planet from the other.” (17)

16 Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Bold Type Books, 2011), 207

17 Ibid., 11.

Resisting and destroying such evil (in this catastrophic form or in what Arendt also defines as its banal form) begins when one accepts that such evil is real, that such evil is a construct one is invested in and attached to in various ways, but that such evil is not yet a terminal condition of the human spirit or our various human-transhuman-bioecological-cosmovisual body politics. To anticipate is to participate in the healing of wounds and traumas which emerge from and loop back into this evil. The practice of anticipation is the practice of countering moral inertia and moral oblivion. To practice anticipation is to practice what the ecotheologian Cynthia Moe-Lobeda calls “love as an ecological-economic vocation,” in which 

“…neighbor-love as an interpersonal and economic norm has two faces: compassion and justice. Neighbor-love as an ecological norm adds a third: Earth’s well-being. We have only begun to uncover the conundrums inherent in this third face of love. The challenge of retheorizing love as an ecological vocation is a weighty and morally compelling challenge for religion of the early twenty-first century.”  (18)

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 201


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