The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three ...
I understand how we got here. It’s the universal desire to live in Cockaigne Cockaigne, the land of milk and honey. . Some of us live in Cockaigne. We’re busy protecting it, building walls and borders to keep the ones not in it out. We do that because we know Cockaigne as it stands doesn’t scale to everybody. The process of creating it has left a lot of people out, has created a lot of damage and destroyed the planet, forcing those not in the protective bubble of Cockaigne to deal with the consequences. We’re also in denial about our ability to keep this protective bubble up and how much suffering building Cockaigne has caused. In his book “Down to Earth” Bruno Latour French philosopher Bruno Latour died in October, 2022. strongly urges us to reconsider this fantasy, to step out of Cockaigne and come back down to Earth. In 140 pages and without using philosophical jargon Latour explains how we got into this mess and he tries to help us find a way out.
For this Latour uses the “convenient abstraction” of vectors of attraction, and specifically the Local to Global attractor. Global represents the drive to “modernize”, to essentially build Cockaigne. Local is what is left behind.
Global used to be a Global-plus but it has reached its limit, it is leaving more and more people behind. Global has turned from being an attractor Global-plus into a Global-minus that repels more. People repelled turn back looking for a nostalgic Local that doesn’t exist. Gradually Global repels more and more people as the damage to our planet increases. We will all learn to be refugees.
So is there a way out? Latour wants everyone to land along a new vector of attraction. The attractor is the mission to protect the planet. Maybe the collective landing along this vector will sum up to a successful rescue.
It won’t be easy. Nobody is willing to give up an inch of their achieved lifestyle and aspires and works towards more and better To make it absolutely clear, I’m including myself. Given where I live and what the common lifestyle there is, my impact footprint is most likely way worse than that of the average human. . There were early signs that we humans don’t really care about consequences to our surroundings when we scale up improvements to our comfort using limited resources in unsustainable ways. Just to pick an example at random, the whales got lucky that we found a replacement for the oil in whale blubber because before we were killing them at a rate of eight thousand a year in the 1700s and 1800s. Our political systems and our collective decision making processes are not really suited to solving complex global problems. And as things deteriorate, our political systems will be in danger of falling prey to demagogues who love nothing more than empty promises on the way to dictatorships.
I don’t know if Latour felt hopeful while writing this book. As the letter “D” in the fantastic New Yorker article “Climate change from A to Z” says: Despair is unproductive. It is also a sin. But we should also not just add to the letter “B” from the same article (in Greta Thunberg’s voice): Bla bla bla.
Maybe humanity will get lucky. Maybe nuclear fusion will become a reality just in time. We will electrify anything that can be possibly electrified. We will find a replacement for cement that doesn’t emit so much carbon and we will de-industrialize and localize agriculture. Hopefully our societal structures and political institutions will hold up in the meantime and withstand the fury unleashed by deteriorating habitats. Hopefully there won’t be wars over the more and more limited resources. A lot of hope and maybes on the very edge of the precipice. Pandemics and idiotic wars by crazy dictators serve as a tragic increase in difficulty of the mission.
The troubling thought is that timelines have compressed and change has accelerated so much that we will find out soon if we make it.