Alternative Guest Editorial: Jonathan Rowson on that impossible term, "we"
Photo by Bekky Bekks on Unsplash
For this week’s editorial we are reproducing an essay by Jonathan Rowson, Director of Perspectiva, about emerging perspectives on the climate crisis. What is the nature of the “we” that tackles it?
Total global deaths from COVID-19 approach five million now and a return to our prior sense of normal seems unlikely, because bio-precarity has become our ecological default. Climate change will remain an indefinite emergency, likely to be worse in its effects than most dare to imagine.
I say this partly because impacts have been worse than expected so far, partly because total carbon emissions are still projected to go up rather than down in the near future, partly because new words are entering our lexicon like ‘nuclear hurricanes’ and ‘wet bulb temperature’, and partly because, as a recent documentary indicated, some scientists have started to cry about climate collapse in public. That’s a different kind of data, but possibly the most persuasive kind.
Technological change is exponential, and some combination of store-able and transport-able renewable energies combined with modest policy resolve could conceivably keep our habitat viable, for a while; but uptake and coordination issues (also known as ‘politics’) are far from trivial.
Technological change is exponential; change in governance is glacial. And clamouring for changes in how power is distributed and wielded is not working, mostly because the public realm is shaped largely by private interests and smart phones, the new axis mundi, are addictive by design. We are beyond clamouring.
There is a risk of valorising change for its own sake, and undervaluing inertia, but in any case immunity to change is part of the predicament. I was twenty-four when the US-led allies went to war in Afghanistan to root out Al-Qaeda in 2001, and am forty-four now as it ends in an anti-heroic departure in 2021. I noticed a peculiar feeling. For the first time in my life I had witnessed a cycle of international activity with a discernible beginning, middle and end.
I was reminded of T.S. Eliot’s line: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.” After two decades of time, many trillions of dollars and abundant bloodshed, the country was in many ways back to where it started.
We all have to find whatever joy in life we can, but some of that joy can and perhaps now must arise from contending with the brokenness we are implicated in.
Post-Tragic Sensibilities
Our orientation then should not be naïve positivity that says ‘we have the technology’, nor a growth-to-goodness fallacy that confuses individual development in our niche for cultivating virtue within systems of power at scale; nor even the ecumenical thinking – ‘we need a new narrative’ – that there could be a single clear imaginative pathway ahead for eight billion wayward human beings.
I am all for being positive, but the case for acknowledging tragedy today is timely, because it is both latent and manifest everywhere, and because it is through tragedy that we know meaning and mattering and ensoulment. The knowledge of tragedy gives us the courage to take life seriously, and to love it, in spite of how it is, and because of how it is.
In the Greek myth, the hope that remained in Pandora’s box after all the bad stuff flew out of it was a kind of expectation (most scholars translate the Greek word elpis as “expectation") but the hope we need today has to be enactive. Our sense of power and possibility arises through action, and we literally cannot conceive what we are capable of until we find the courage to act.
But action that stems from delusion will quickly encounter countervailing forces from its own shadow material, whether that’s mother nature batting last or AI moving beyond human control – arguably both are already underway. Techno-optimism in general and green growth in particular exemplify this kind of delusion, but Liberalism more broadly suffers from it too.
Wewho?
Since language is one of the main active ingredients in social change, and since our most pressing ecological challenges call for unprecedented collective and coordinated action, we have no choice but to attend more carefully to the way we conceive and speak of ‘we’ – the most problematic pronoun of them all.
I am not referring to a postmodern directive to be more diverse and inclusive. Rather, in the style of the best warrior-pedants, I seek to highlight that the problems we think of as economic or political or epistemic or technological or spiritual may all in some fundamental sense be problems of our grammar too.
The mostly unreflective way we use ‘we’ in our discussions of societal direction very often ignores varying perceptions, competing interests and power dynamics and thereby obscures the nature of the work that needs to be done. A figure/ground reversal is called for, in which there is a shift from assuming our collective perception, understanding and interests of the world are a stable vantage point; while the figure or situation we look at together is what remains in question.
I think the challenge is the other way round, namely to immerse ourselves in our predicament in such a way that we see the We in question more clearly, and to prioritise acting on that.
The main limitation with the idea that we face a climate emergency, for instance, is that there is no ‘we’ as such to address it. The We that wants to say there is an emergency is not the same We as the We that needs to hear it, and the We that needs to hear it has several different ideas about the nature of the We that should do something about it.
The non-trivial problem at hand is that we is a term that leads by implication to the presumption that there could be an optimally cooperative form of collective agency at a global scale. That kind of democratic (‘we the people’) and global we (humankind) is presupposed in questions like:
· What do we need to do to address climate change?
· How do we work together to co-create a more conscious society?
· What can we do to strengthen the epistemic commons?
· How might we save democracy from itself?
· Why can’t we channel technological innovation in a way that benefits everyone?
I’m beginning to think these questions are fundamentally back to front. Consider this alternative framing of these kinds of conundrums:
· How might the reality of incipient climate collapse be conceived and acted upon in ways that help us transform the We that has failed to prevent it?
· How might the institutions and norms of democracy be strengthened in ways that help to forge a We that is worthy of the ideal and not one that is destroying it?
· How might technology best be designed, owned, regulated and perhaps even in some fundamental sense dethroned, to foster the kind of We that makes a good society possible?
The intellectual function is humiliated today in many ways, but one of the main reasons we are struggling to make sense of our plight is because we are obliged to invoke a We does not really exist, and talking as if it does evokes widespread dissonance. Perhaps this is part of the breakdown of the mental/rational mode of consciousness that visionaries like Jean Gebser prophesised.
I say this mistake in perception and understanding is grammatical because We is used as a descriptive pronoun implying everyone, but it should be used in a more dynamic and hybrid form, perhaps an abstract noun characterised as a living question.
I am grateful to Minna Salami for suggesting ‘Wewho’ as an alternative framing, as in “Wewho have to act urgently on climate change!” I don’t expect anybody to start talking like that soon, but it may not be a bad thing if they did.
I am reminded that love, according to Iris Murdoch, is “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real”. If love is indeed the answer, the extremely difficult realisation is also the answer. The Beatles (no less) suggested that “All you need is love”, and they might be right, while The Fetzer Institute, one of Perspectiva’s main supporters, continues to place a strong emphasis on love as an underlying reality, a moral lodestar, a spiritual inspiration.
I am all for that. And yet, clearly the love needed at a global scale is not about everyone converging on the same sweet flavour of emotion.
The extremely difficult realisation is not just that there is a world beyond our heads, or that people have different values and personalities and priorities. We can navigate collective action problems, and we can manage various kinds of commons in principle, as Elinor Ostrom, the only woman to have won the Nobel prize in economics, has shown.
Yet the population typically features about 3-5% who are sociopathic and an alarming proportion of people lean authoritarian, and these days their voices are amplified in ways that make others afraid. You would think the clear ecological collapse of our shared planet would galvanise cooperation, but this feels more like a time of polarisation and fragmentation than convergence.
We have form. It’s not as though the world hasn’t tried already to develop some sense of itself as one organism, one family, and this is indicated institutionally over the last century at least.
The League of Nations (1919) led to the UN (c1941) and there was something like a post-war international order based on The Bretton Woods agreement for the global macroeconomy (1944) and the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948). During the Cold War (1947-1991) there was a fundamental division, but major international covenants on economic, social and cultural rights and civil and political rights (1976) happened nonetheless and there have been many waves of Globalisation that we started talking of as ‘a thing’ by the 1990s.
When I travelled playing chess in the nineties and noughties I became familiar with the Latin motto of the world chess federation F.I.D.E: Gens una Sumus. It means ‘we are one people’. And yet we are not, yet.
The full essay is here, from the Emerge platform