Nature's Evil

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.