Nature's Evil

Conclusion: Leviathan or Gaia

Steam and electricity liberated productive labour from its age-old dependence on a particular fixed spot that provided energy – a stable, a waterwheel or a windmill. This new-found liberty led to an unprecedented growth in industry and trade, in the consumption of resources and in the pollution of the environment. 1 Thanks to fossil fuel, production has ‘slipped the bonds of surly earth’. But extraction is still chained to those spots where natural resources and human labour meet. More and more of us carry around our daily toil in portable gadgets as we work from home or roam round our cities. But we are still dependent on a Gilgamesh who has occupied a cedar forest on the hill.

Armed with industrial technologies, we are now reverting from fossil fuel to the power of wind, water and the sun. This switch will be difficult. 2 Renewable energy will not be able to meet today’s agriculture and transport needs. A radical reduction in energy consumption is essential, but this requires billions of people to change their way of life. I am writing this in 2020, and it looks as if humankind, unable to accomplish this task, has outsourced it to the virus. We no longer travel and eat out, but our emissions are still unacceptably high. Switching to wind farms, solar panels and sophisticated batteries radically increases the need for old and new sorts of raw material, from sand to rare metals. The growth of renewable energy in the twenty-first century is slower than that of steam power in the nineteenth century. The fourth energy transition is achievable, but it will be a long-drawn-out and very difficult process. Buoyed up by enthusiasm, ‘green’ politicians underestimate these difficulties; scientists should share their knowledge with the public.

The Gaia hypothesis

About fifty years ago, the doctor and climatologist James Lovelock formulated the Gaia hypothesis. 3 The earth is a living organism, made up of human beings and other organisms, as well as the oceans, the atmosphere and the earth’s crust. The living planet, named in honour of the ancient goddess Gaia, can adapt, develop and overcome difficulties. But, as with any other organism, Gaia’s potential for self-regulation has its limits. Some injuries heal, others may become malignant. Lovelock considers humankind as part of this process. When human beings destabilise Gaia, she will sacrifice them if that’s what it takes to keep the planet healthy. According to the ancient myth, Gaia was the wife of Uranos, and she incited their son, Kronos, to castrate his father. Splashes of semen scattered around the world, giving birth to the Titans. In the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence there is a famous portrayal of this act, painted by Giorgio Vasari. Gaia is guiding the arm of Kronos as he strikes the fatal blow against the creator of the universe.

Bruno Latour took Lovelock’s ideas even further. Latour makes mighty, horrifying Gaia a symbol of nature which rises up against humankind. The philosopher insists on Gaia’s singularity and physicality but rejects the anthropomorphic idea that she has a soul or a plan. Made up of people and nature, Gaia is a single entity encompassing contradictory elements. She is both nurturing mother and castrator. She used to be both alluring and scary, but nowadays she shows us only her terrible aspect. The catastrophe that threatens us on a global scale is not a war of all against all, of people against people, but a hybrid battle of many natural forces, including human ones, for their very existence. Such a battle cannot be stopped by local Leviathans, no matter how terrible they might be. Faced with global Gaia, these giants look like midgets. The new image of power is not male but female, not political but ecological, not national but universal – but, as before, it is sublime and terrifying. Monstrous Gaia, the mother of Time, is threatening the panic-stricken world with castration – this is the philosopher’s warning to our archaic era.

Latour makes frequent and critical references to Hobbes. 4 What he is seeking is a suitable replacement for Leviathan, and he finds it in the image of Gaia. Leviathan was the idea of coercive power in the mercantile state. Dramatic but calculating, this male monster stops the war of all against all, but only on the land he has already occupied. Hobbes lived in a century of war and revolution, and he knew that, while domestic peace was possible and highly desirable, the war of all against all – a state of nature – would endure between countries. His only hope was that the sovereign could call a halt to civil war on a self-contained island. Composed of the people, Leviathan can prevent violence only within himself – within the state – but he cannot solve global problems. In the world war with nature, every state has its own interest, which usually consists of continuing the war. No single state is capable of preventing climate catastrophe or a pandemic. This can only be achieved by a new monster, the size of the planet and female. She terrifies the sovereigns just as they terrify the individual members of their societies. Gaia is needed to end the battle of them all, sovereigns and their subjects, against nature.

This is Latour’s myth, and I think there is some truth in it, and some falsehood as well. Gaia is real but not entire. She is as multitudinous as humanity, as pluralist as society. The natural history of evil has been endlessly various. Resources are all different because each and every one of them involved a particular interaction between people and nature. Each natural resource has its own political characteristics. Along with people who extract, process and trade it, each resource is a social institution which works according to the rules set by nature. To unite people and nature would entail granting rights of citizenship to natural phenomena and integrating their tales along with human voices in a comprehensive plebiscite. This is a distant utopia, but we will get there, if we survive. In the meantime we are travelling in the opposite direction, down a blind alley.

In 1974 William Nordhaus predicted the transition from a ‘cowboy economy’ to a ‘spaceship economy’. Cowboys consume as much as they like, regardless of the waste produced, because they see nature as obedient and infinite. Astronauts focus on the limited resources available to support their life, and they recycle what they have consumed. An epoch later, in 2018, Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for this work, but his prediction hasn’t come true. Humankind is behaving more like cowboys who find themselves in a spaceship than like astronauts who have landed on the prairie. Multiplying and fruitful, humankind is approaching the year that Nordhaus predicted for climate catastrophe – 2030. The glaciers are melting, and temperatures fluctuate widely. The summers are intolerably hot. Fires are destroying those forests that survived the axe. Fertile lands are turning into desert. Permafrost looks like marshland, and strange bubbles burst under the surface. The frontier between culture and nature is still moving, nature’s territory is shrinking, and viruses are coming out of left field. 5

During the twentieth century, the total consumption of material resources, calculated in tons, increased by a factor of eight. The world population also grew, but the extraction of material resources per head doubled in the course of the century. In 2008 the total consumption of natural resources (excluding water) consisted of 62 billion metric tonnes of raw material; in 2020 this reached 100 billion. If water is included in these calculations, the result is tripled by weight: the world uses about 100 billion tonnes of fresh water per year, most of it in agriculture. The richer the country, the more matter its citizens consume. In 2011 in India, per capita consumption of natural resources was 4 tonnes, in Canada more than 25 tonnes; an American uses thirty times as much energy as an Indian. The difference in the consumption of resources depends on the population density. Countries with sparse populations consume more raw materials and energy per capita. Towns require fewer raw materials and less energy than agricultural areas. Urbanisation saves energy and frees up land for growing forests which absorb carbon dioxide. But towns need jobs; any service – information, finances, transportation, entertainment – requires significant amounts of energy; and most energy in this world comes from fossil fuel. Modern goods undergo ‘dematerialisation’: computers are ever smaller; one smartphone now does the jobs of several bigger devices. But the total volume of raw materials consumed by humanity increases every year, both in absolute figures and as a per capita figure. Unfortunately, the saving on material is achieved because of a greater expenditure of energy.

Emissions reliably track economic growth. Between 2014 and 2020, worldwide gross product – the total of all goods and bads produced, bought and sold in the world – was growing annually by 3 to 4 per cent, and global emissions of carbon were growing by 2 to 3 per cent. Discussed by economists and promised by bureaucrats, the decoupling of these two processes has not happened. In the series of international conferences, culminating in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the Paris Agreement in 2015, governments signed up to good intentions. However, not a single developed country has met the obligations it undertook as part of the Paris Agreement. The agreed goal was to limit the increase in average global temperature to 1.5 degrees above the temperature of the planet in 1880. In fact, a rise of 2, or even 3, degrees is predicted by 2050.

Oil remains the engine of the world economy. The mining and burning of coal, the most polluting fuel, continues. Economic growth continues to be the desired goal of all the governments on earth. The use of renewable energy is growing more quickly than expected, but this trickle of good news does not make up for the torrent of bad news. The Trump administration abolished even those tentative measures to limit emissions which the Obama administration introduced. In 2018, at the summit in Katowice – the traditional centre of the Polish coal industry – United Nations experts agreed there were only ten years left for humanity to take the necessary measures to lower emissions by a factor of two – only by doing this can we reach the old goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees by 2050. But these were not the official conclusions. The four oil superpowers – the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – vetoed their adoption.

The climate has already become as warm as it was before the Ice Age, but the sea level was 30 metres higher then. Further warming will lead to the destruction of coral reefs, the flooding of island states and sea ports, a worldwide crisis in production, and the migration of populations on a massive scale. Dozens of countries – small, medium and large – will declare a state of emergency. The future fall in global output as a result of climate change is estimated at 10 to 25 per cent. Some of these predictions have already materialised. Since 1950, the number of floods has increased fifteenfold, the number of wildfires sevenfold. The first victims are those who share the earth with us but, unlike us, have no clothes, houses or air conditioners to protect them. During the last fifty years, the population of vertebrates has fallen by 60 per cent. Scientists are concerned at the disappearance of insects. Their collective biomass is diminishing at a rate of 2.5 per cent per year, and, unless something is done, by the end of the century there simply won’t be any more insects. More than half of the bee population in the USA has already died out. Pollinating countless plants, insects are a source of food for fish and birds. Thousands of their species will disappear too.

Predictions of catastrophe exert their own fascination. But the greatest disasters will be unexpected. For example, myriads of towns, railways and gas pipelines are constructed on the permafrost. As the climate warms, the permafrost will melt everywhere, but millions of people and billions of dollars depend on the chance place where the surface caves in. Forecasts extrapolate from observations that have been made in the past, but changes in the climate create a feedback loop. Living marshlands are as good as forests at absorbing carbon dioxide, but when the temperature rises the marshes perish, giving off methane. It is a vicious circle. Gradual changes alternate with explosive bursts, and they are unpredictable. That is the nature of evil.

Governments will continue to battle with the same problems with which they have always battled, such as migration. They don’t know how to cope with floods, sink holes, and the destruction of cities. Like everything to do with geography, events will occur unevenly. The coastal states of South-East Asia will come off worst. But the port cities of the Atlantic which developed for global trade will also experience their share of suffering: from Venice to Amsterdam, and from New Orleans to St Petersburg, these classical megapolises will be submerged. And, unlike the Lisbon earthquake, which could not be blamed on the sins of human beings who were simply punished for nothing, the climate catastrophe will be our fault.

Jevons’s predictions have only partly come true – coal has not even begun to run out, and oil isn’t running out either. But Jevons’s paradox is being proved with a vengeance: the more efficient the use of any sort of raw material, the more of it is consumed. So far, the only raw material of which mankind is using less, thanks to technological progress, is paper. Forests are no longer felled for the sake of bureaucratic correspondence; now they are cut down for other purposes. Even if the dreams of the Internet of Things come to pass and every home is furnished with a 3D printer which can manufacture things on the spot, this will cut out the need for transportation but will not save as much raw material and energy as was the case with paper. At the Katowice summit of 2018, experts called for a 20 per cent reduction of oil and gas production by 2030 and a 55 per cent reduction by 2050. Their plea did not fall entirely on deaf ears. The powerful American investor Warren Buffet has invested $30 billion in ‘green’ electricity generation. Another billionaire-activist, Elon Musk, plans to fill the roads with electric vehicles. Some global funds, controlling trillions of dollars, have divested from oil investments. In the face of the pandemic, the European Union has accepted an ambitious plan for a ‘green recovery’.

The parasitic state

In 1740, a Prussian prince wrote a short book entitled Anti-Machiavel . He explained that the task of the sovereign is not to seek glory or fill the treasury but to create a common good – the flourishing of his people. But when this author became Frederick the Great, he encountered various difficulties. The sovereign wants the common good, the elite is fixated on wealth, the people aspire to survive. The forms of redistribution, however, depend on the available resources. It is easier to tax grain than potatoes, bank accounts than gold. In 1917, the revolution in Russia abolished the old currency, but there was still grain stored in barns and gold in money boxes; the new state wished to confiscate them – naturally, in the name of the common good. Requisitions of grain were made by armed units, but gold and jewellery were easier to conceal from them, and a more creative strategy was practised. The government launched the chain of state-owned pawn shops known as Torgsin and invited the citizens to exchange gold for bread. The same intelligence officers who in the 1920s had engaged in the export of hemp and furs (see chapter 3 ) switched to extracting gold from the population. During the famine, these pawn shops made handsome profits. In desperation, people in the provinces had to buy food at the unheard-of prices that were fixed by officials in Moscow. The people’s gold was used to buy factories and technology – Torgsin paid for a third of the imports which were necessary for Stalin’s industrialisation. 6 Hunger created profit for the treasury and was used for the ‘development’ of the country. This is an extreme example of the mercantile pump, in which the interest of the sovereign was directly opposite to the prosperity of the people. But states have always and everywhere spread the fiction that their interests were as one with the common good.

The world in which capitalism flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was not very different from the world of Herodotus. Distant colonies supplied the imperial centres with their exotic materials, while the ruling nations created wealth from labour and knowledge. But the mass society also created something genuinely new: the enrichment of the masses was a condition for the success of the state. Neither Xerxes nor the imperial mercantilists knew such things. Although the growth of the imperial trade in sugar, cotton or opium depended on the trickling down of these former luxuries to the egalitarian masses, classical debates overlooked mass consumption as the engine of growth. The second Industrial Revolution revealed a deep paradox of the new economy: wealth rushes towards conspicuous consumption but is formed by the mass market. 7 Luxury items – for example cars – bring about economic growth only when they become cheap enough to be affordable by the majority. For the Founding Fathers, the measure of the American dream was the number of acres per household; for the Fordists, it was the number of cars on the drive.

Optimists took the new correspondence between the interests of the people and the interests of the state as a universal law of the new era; in fact, it was a temporary blip which did not survive beyond the middle of the twentieth century. Simon Kuznets, the American economist of Belarusian origin, believed that, with economic growth, income inequality first increases and then decreases. 8 In 1971, he received the Nobel Prize for Economics, and ‘the Kuznets curve’ – an arc showing the relation between the growth of national economics and the inequality of citizen’s incomes – has graced many textbooks. But all of us – global citizens and particles of Gaia – are still waiting for the downward turn of this curve. Refuting Keynes’s belief that inequality leads to fixed capital investment, inequality is greater but the investment in infrastructure is less in the early twenty-first century than it was in the second half of the twentieth century. Every year, national elites consume ever larger shares of material resources, energy and air. Globally, inequality is growing even faster than warming, and contributes to it. Soviet socialism is a thing of the past, but so is American Fordism. The post-Cold War elites have stopped investing in the illusion of their usefulness; the age of cynical reason has begun. Tired of creating myths, the most powerful people on the planet have rejected reality.

In a labour-intensive economy there are limits to inequality; in a resource-dependent economy, monopolies grow without limit, and so does inequality. A state which is a monopoly producer of raw material, or is part of a cartel of such producers, has no reason to support justice, competition and the rule of law. Such a state does not depend on taxes and thus does not depend on the population. On the contrary, the population depends on the state. Its bureaucracy redistributes wealth, reserving a generous helping for itself. Political commentators have tried out different names for this type of state: the rentier state, the neopatrimonial state, the Mafia state, the kleptocratic state, the super-extractive state … In this competition to find a fitting name for disaster, my choice is ‘the parasitic state’. The original Greek meaning of the word ‘parasite’, today familiar from its use in medicine, was a ‘hanger-on’; it is time to return this useful word to the social sciences. * The parasitic state is a political community which maintains the attributes of a state but fails to fulfil its functions. In my view, parasitism is the extreme version of mercantilism. The parasitic state retains many of the traits of the mercantile state, and in particular its focus on the growth of gold reserves thanks to the export of raw materials and the restraint on mass consumption. But unlike mercantile empires, which in their best moments realised the functions of the state within their metropolitan lands (but of course not in the colonies), the parasitic state fails to meet these functions even for its own population. Public goods are unavailable or a fiction, social capital deteriorates, people and money flee the country. Instead of the old imperial ‘progress’ we see the triumph of archaic beliefs, demodernisation and decay.

Depending on the chosen resource, the parasitic state forms under specific conditions. First, such a state relies on a primary commodity, which liberates it from dependence on labour and people. Second, this commodity must be topical, not diffused, thus providing this state with the opportunity for a monopoly price formation, alone or with a cartel of its peers. Third, the commodity must be addictive, thus promising an unlimited growth in demand. In such a state, the population is superfluous, as Hannah Arendt put it in her study of colonial and totalitarian societies. 9 Such a society cannot say to its government, ‘no taxation without representation’. Once the key enterprises require relatively little labour, the workers cannot go on strike. If the wealth of the nation doesn’t depend on the labour and knowledge of the people, health services and education become irrelevant for the national economy. Instead of being a source of national wealth, the people become recipients of state charity. In this parasitic biopolitics the population wastes away or fails to thrive, not because of a policy of deliberate extermination but due to endemic neglect. The more the state relies on natural resources, the less it invests in human capital; the lower the level of human capital, the more such a state depends on its resource extraction. The circle is vicious.

Progress and the katechon

The decades after the Second World War were the period of the ‘Great Acceleration’: the world population grew exponentially, and the consumption of raw materials grew even faster. 10 Held back by the Cold War, the growth of global inequality temporarily ceased, but the collapse of the Soviet Empire lifted self-restraint. During the last thirty years, economic inequality – a source of political evil – has grown more quickly than it ever did before, except when a victorious empire captured fresh colonies. The oiligarchs and officials of the former Soviet states have joined in this feast along with the rich of West and East, those who inherited old money and those who have made their wealth online. Puzzled, the moralists of the future will be looking for explanations as to why the people of the Anthropocene have unleashed the instincts which some of the previous epochs restrained or redirected more successfully. Latour believes that these are the last convulsions, the results of a subterranean awareness of the approaching climate catastrophe. 11 From the times of Herodotus, history has been imagined as a movement from the knowable past to the uncertain future. But the idea of social progress – history as growth – can hardly be detected even in Machiavelli; it appears in the era of great empires. The first person to use the word ‘progress’ was Francis Bacon, who oversaw England’s most successful expansion. The Age of the Enlightenment was the age of agricultural ‘improvements’ and industrial ‘growth’. Developed in the age of sugar, the tradition of Hume and Smith asserted the idea of insatiable desire. Combined with individual enrichment, service to progress became an addiction itself. Adventure and invention brought wealth which improved the lives of Europeans, while those who toiled in the mines and on the plantations could be ignored. Mass disillusionment began in the twentieth century and reached its peak after 1968. Professors’ expectations that their students would become better proletarians than the proletariat were not borne out; this led to the rejection of progressive politics and of belief in progress itself. Growth continued, but moral progress remained as mythical as the phlogiston sought by medieval alchemists.

In 1968, the industrialist and anti-fascist activist Aurelio Peccei and the chemist Alexander King declared that the end of economic growth was inevitable. If we cannot get growth with zero emissions, we will have to live in a world without growth. Having founded the Club of Rome, they succeeded in turning the idea of limited growth into a respectable project. In 2000, Al Gore, who had the greenest programme in the history of American elections, lost to George Bush, an oilman from Texas. In 2005 the Kyoto Agreement, which called for limits on emissions, was meant to come into force; the USA did not ratify it, and the treaty is ineffective. In 2009 a controversy erupted: hackers stole thousands of documents from leading climatologists. Their selective editing distorted scholarly debate to make it appear that man-made climate change was a scientific conspiracy. During the presidential campaign of 2016, a similar ‘leak’ of Democratic Party documents was very helpful to Donald Trump in his denial of global warming. In 2018, however, even the media climate changed; for example, the BBC overturned a previous ruling that discussions on climate change had to present both sides of the argument. In 2020 we see much more clearly than our predecessors in 1968 that industrial expansion must stop, not because it exhausts resources but because it pollutes the atmosphere. Coal and oil will never run out because our air will have run out long before that.

Current history feels like a movement towards foreclosure – the katechon rather than progress. 12 Envisioned by mystics and magi, the idea that the mission of humanity is to resist or defer the coming End – the idea of katechon – is a powerful explanation for the extraordinary events that we have seen between 2008 and 2020. Those who believed in progress knew that it had its friends and enemies – those who pushed it forward and those who blocked or tried to reverse it. The same goes for katechon. A feast in the time of plague was always a popular fantasy, but the politics of the twenty-first century is closer to the last battle. The rich, the smart and the powerful are quicker to panic – maybe they see the signs of disaster earlier than others, or they just have more to lose. Disenchanted with progress, the rich disinvest from the future. Instead of brokering a truce, the powerful are using the last chance to settle old scores. Scared of the present, the privileged talk ceaselessly about the past. Instead of seeing a multitude of chances and challenges, the elites foreclose on them. By denying changes and boycotting actions, they have turned themselves into Gaia’s errand boys.

The Great Acceleration ended with a global political crisis in anticipation of the catastrophe. With the arrival of COVID-19, a new clinical ecology has melded with the old political economy, but this has not necessitated radical changes. We know that the virus came from a wet market, but these gruesome institutions continue their trade. We know that, to avert the climate crisis, giving up meat is even more important than giving up petrol. But no government that depends on the popular vote will intervene so drastically in people’s behaviour: this demand is no less radical than what the early Christians did or what the Russian Bolsheviks wanted. During the pandemic of 2020, people’s ability to change their behaviour by their own will has been demonstrably lacking, and states have introduced lockdowns. The climate challenge is much tougher. The state or the system of states will have to re-educate people, recondition their ways of life and, if necessary, implement rationing. Leviathan must turn green, or implode. The rest is up to Gaia.

We are talking about deeply unpopular measures. The state remains the only power that stands between the greed of the energy barons and the tragedy of drowned cities. Adequate measures must be long-term, universal and coordinated: this is why we need the state. The climate catastrophe will happen later, but we must rein ourselves in now; people are not wise enough to do this voluntarily. Floods will begin in Holland, but it is also necessary to abstain from meat and petrol in Switzerland; people are not good enough to do this without being reminded. Having survived holy empires and world wars, humanity has never needed a social compact more than today. This must be not a contract between individual citizens but a peace treaty between people and nature. Such a treaty will hardly be concluded without sacrifices on both sides. If democratic politics does not help, then decisions will be taken under a state of emergency. The state of exception, a latter-day version of the Russian oprichnina , will discontinue the rule of law. National efforts will not be enough to cope with ecological crisis. Here we have the free-rider problem, another aspect of the tragedy of the commons: if there is no mechanism of control and compulsion, common efforts will be sabotaged by one of the players, and ultimately by all of them. Nordhaus’s plan would have prevented warming if it had been implemented in the 1990s on a global scale. However, there’s a trap: the American economist did hope to persuade his fellow countrymen to spend more and pollute less. But, for cultural rather than economic reasons, he would have had no chance in other states around the globe, from Mexico to China; and if other states continued to pollute the world, there would be no motive to stop doing it in America. International relations are considered different from internal affairs because individual states have no common interests. If common interests do emerge – for example, protection against pirates or the establishment of the gold standard – then political alliances also develop. The threat of climate catastrophe is the first genuinely common interest – a global goal which cannot be divided into parts. The sociologist Ulrich Beck said in his last book that only global warming could save us. But many – and the doctors of the Christian Church knew this all too well – simply don’t want to be saved.

Four justices

The COVID-19 pandemic has compelled many governments of the world to formulate programmes of action which entail reaching carbon neutrality, removing notorious subsidies from oil producers, subsidising renewable energy and assisting the sick and the underprivileged. But again because of the pandemic, most of these ideas remain on paper. In the USA, the name of the project that is waiting for realisation, the Green New Deal, alludes to the policy which brought relief from the Great Depression. That New Deal was also green – Roosevelt’s administration founded the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed 250,000 people, and was also known as ‘Roosevelt’s Forest Army’. Between 1933 and 1942, the corps planted 3 billion trees, bringing an end to the dust storms in several states. 13 Hopefully, the New Green Deal will do even more. In Europe, the ambitious but underfinanced project of green recovery has been accepted under the pressure of COVID.

The green recovery subordinates economics to politics and politics to ecology. A new programme of recognition and redistribution , it is much more inclusive than the reconstruction and welfare programmes that we saw in the past. The American philosopher Nancy Fraser has developed the concepts of recognition and redistribution in her critical analysis of justice in contemporary societies. 14 In my view, these helpful concepts should be broadened to include not only human but also non-human agents. If various elements of nature, from insects to permafrost, are recognised as critically important for the continuation of life, then multiple resources – also extracted from nature but with the added value of human labour and knowledge – should be redistributed in their favour. This will include a partial decommodification of nature: many forests will be restored, livestock farms closed, and growth discontinued. Calculated in monetary terms, gross product is the measure of the commodification of nature and labour. If different natural resources have different political characteristics, then adding them all up with goods and services is pointless. As long as national governments continue to exist, their milestones will be the gigatons of carbon released into the atmosphere; and, if we are all to survive, countries will compete not for the growth of domestic product but for the reduction of national emissions. This would be the equivalent of implementing a ‘carbon standard’, with the carbon footprint replacing gold as the general equivalent. At the moment this sounds like a utopian idea, though from the economic perspective it is quite realistic; all the obstacles are political (see chapter 13 ).

It is hard to give up the idea of unlimited growth, but we have already had to renounce many of our cherished ideas – for example, progress: our mothers and grandfathers lived worse than us, our daughters and grandsons will live better, and this assumption accords with the emotional patterns of love and pride. But, in rich countries, the under-thirties are the first generation for centuries to be worse off than their parents or grandparents. Life will be even less comfortable in a world that will be 1 or 2 degrees warmer than it is today. Floods and fires will absorb trillions of dollars, which will damage the labour market still further. Pandemics and wars will reduce life expectancy and lead to mass migrations, which will cause a further deterioration in the political climate. Most probably, the routine blessings of a modest life – a house, a car, tourist travel, holidays in the countryside and, ultimately, ‘nature’ herself – will become luxuries.

Looking back at the last hundred years, we can see that class inequality has hardly changed in the modern world – even wars and revolutions reduced it only for a short while. Gender inequality has gradually diminished thanks to women’s entry into the full-time labour market, but great differences remain. The inequality between different countries reflects the variability of nature and history – global warming will only accentuate these differences. Inequality among different age cohorts is a relatively new topic for the social sciences – but not, of course, for the moral thinkers who have repeatedly called for fathers to do the best for their children. In our pre-apocalyptic world, the ideal of cohort equality is critically important. Can we prevent the sufferings of future generations by our efforts?

Society does not live outside nature, and economic life is not separate from its ecological consequences. Every act of individual consumption causes another release of carbon into the atmosphere which we all breathe – plants, animals, people. Ecological reforms depend on behavioural changes which will amount to a revolution, and they will be impossible without equally radical changes in international relations. Only a global community can avert catastrophe, and once again revolution can succeed only if it is worldwide. The New Deal worked in one individual country, but the Green New Deal will work only on a planet-wide scale. The scale of the impending catastrophe is tantamount to the establishment of global sovereignty: the terror will come not from Leviathan but from Gaia.

If he happened to turn up in our too sunny world, Candide would recognise familiar themes. The pandemic would not surprise him – he had heard of plagues that were even more horrible. He would rejoice for Pangloss, who would be cured of his venereal disease, and would be amazed by all the gadgets in our technological Eldorado. But he would be still more astonished to hear taxi drivers banging on about prices and oligarchs, traffic jams and wildfires. He would think how simple and comprehensible the Lisbon earthquake was. It killed people but didn’t discredit humanity. Victims were counted in thousands, but there were no perpetrators. Man-made horror is a different thing altogether: it humiliates and devalues. There’s nothing worse than feeling guilty, Candide would think, observing the mess we have made of our world. For centuries people have been inflicting suffering on one another, all the while repeating sermons about goodness and peace. The reasons were and are the same – the greed of some and the stupidity of others. Greed and stupidity eat away at the foundations of solidarity which nature instilled in us. Because of them, humankind grows on nature’s beautiful body like a malignant tumour, gobbling up some of her juices and poisoning others.

‘Excellently observed,’ Candide would say; ‘but let us cultivate our garden.’ 15

Note

Notes

1 Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene . 2 Smil, Energy Transitions ; Smil, Making the Modern World . 3 Lovelock, Gaia . 4 Latour, Facing Gaia . 5 Nordhaus, ‘Reflections on the economics of climate change’; Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World . 6 Osokina, Zoloto dlya industrializatsii . 7 Mokyr, The Lever of Riches ; Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul . 8 Kuznets, Toward a Theory of Economic Growth . 9 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism . 10 Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene . 11 Latour, ‘Europe as a refuge’. 12 Agamben, The Time that Remains . 13 Deaton, ‘How FDR fought climate change’. 14 Fraser, ‘From redistribution to recognition?’; Fraser, ‘Behind Marx’s hidden abode’. 15 Voltaire, Candide , p. 97.