Source: ABC
URL: https://soundcloud.com/fay-kelly-tuncay/whats-left-about
Date: 04/09/2012
Event: Brendan O'Neill: "What's left about environmentalism?"
Credit: Fay Kelly-Tuncay and ABC
People:
Brendan O'Neill: In recent years, one of the most striking developments on the left has been the rise and rise of environmentalist thinking. It is now automatically assumed that every decent leftie will also be a good greenie, that every left-winger should be deeply concerned about climate change and about mankind's allegedly rapacious use of natural resources. Being eco-friendly has joined being anti-war and owning a Che Guevara T-shirt as one of the main pillars of left-wing existence.
But I don't think there is anything left-wing about environmentalism. The political colours red and green should never be seen. They don't mix well at all. In fact, I reckon the left's embrace of the pieties of environmentalism represents an historic betrayal of the ideas and principles that were once associated with being left-wing.
In going green, the left has signalled its abandonment of the values that once distinguished our political movement from the more conservative, static sections of society. The great thing about the left, when it first emerged, and about the humanist traditions that preceded it, was its belief that the problems facing mankind were social rather than natural. Socialism's greatest contribution to political thinking was its promotion of the idea that mankind's biggest problem was not natural limits but, rather, limits to our social imaginations. The clue was in the name - "social-ism". A belief that society itself needed to be re-thought and, possibly, overhauled in order to improve human life.
Where traditionalist thinkers argued that there were strict God-given or Mother Nature-enforced limits to what mankind could do, the left argued that actually, our problems were social and therefore susceptible to social solutions, if we were willing to think big. Problems like hunger, unemployment, low horizons, lack of development in some parts of the world - these were all products of our pretty strange social system, left-wingers argued, and therefore could potentially be resolved if we had a proper rethink and reboot of that social system.
Right from the Renaissance to the French Revolution to some of the socialist movements that emerged in the 20th century, the instinct of humanist and, later, left-leaning thinkers was to challenge the idea that mankind was a prisoner of nature or a prisoner of divinity. Instead, they put the case for our ability, our responsibility in fact, to de-mystify and humanise nature, to use her resources for the advancement of our way of life.
As the great 16th century revolutionary Francis Bacon put it: "We must put nature on the rack and extract her secrets". Or as the radical left-wing suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst said, more recently, in the early 20th century: "Socialism means plenty for all. We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity but of abundance. We call for a great production that will supply more than all the people can consume". From Enlightenment humanists to socialist thinkers, there emerged this really powerful belief that mankind was limited by his imagination and his social setup rather than by nature, alongside a conviction that we could satisfy everyone's needs and desires if we put our minds to it.
On the flipside, it tended to be the conservative and backward-looking sections of society which promoted naturalistic thinking, which argued that there was a natural order and natural limits to mankind's aspirations. And it was these more conservative elements who said: "Woe betide a mere mortal man who believes he can transgress these natural limits". from anti-Enlightenment religious leaders to the Romantic reaction to the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Malthusian groups in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was those who were most hostile to humanist or left-wing thought who argued that Mother Nature was the ultimate determiner of human fortunes.
And this clash between the traditionalist belief that our problems were caused by natural limits and the left-wing belief that they were caused by social limits was best summed up by the 19th century fisticuffs between Malthusians and Marxists. The Reverend Thomas Malthus was one of the first promoters of the overpopulation thesis. A man of the cloth and an infamous loather of proles, he wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population between 1798 and 1826. That essay claimed that there were only so many natural resources to go round, and therefore if stupid, ugly poor people didn't stop having so many babies, there would be widespread famine and resource conflict. In essence, Malthus was one of the first ever greens.
Meanwhile, Karl Marx and his supporters spent much of the 19th century challenging this narrow, naturalistic Malthusian view of the problems facing mankind. Marx described Malthus's arguments as "a libel on the human race". He said that if we accepted the Malthusian idea of natural scarcity, then we would have to accept, quote - "that socialism cannot abolish poverty because poverty has its base in nature" - end quote. So challenging theories of natural limits was absolutely key to the early Marxists, who passionately believed that our hardships were based in society, not in nature.
In the early 20th century, Isaak Rubin, a Russian revolutionary who was later murdered during Stalin's purges of the 1930s, wrote a brilliant essay attacking the apologetic naturalism of Malthus and his minions. Rubin described Malthus as "a professional sycophant of the landed aristocracy". He said Malthus had used naturalistic arguments to try to make the case for the inevitability of poverty. In contrast, said Rubin, it was the job of the revolutionary left to argue that man's yearning to multiply was restricted not by natural forces but by social ones.
How times have changed. What a massive turnaround there has been on the left. Today the left, through the politics of environmentalism, is at the forefront of depicting mankind's problems as natural rather than social, as a simple case of limited natural resources rather than a more complicated case of limited social imagination. Today it is the left that commits a libel on the human race. The left's embrace of environmentalism represents perhaps the greatest political makeover in living memory. Today huge swathes of the left have accommodated to the old conservative idea that their forebears so valiantly argued against. The idea that there are natural limits and that mankind had better respect those limits or else pay the price of famine, conflict and planetary mayhem.
You can see this in the way that many left-wingers now depict nature almost as a sentient force, which occasionally punishes mankind for his hubris. By using terms like "the weather of mass destruction" and talking about mankind being battered by the god of the sea, greens rehabilitate old pre-socialist ideas about mankind being a prisoner of nature, hemmed in on all sides by the scarcity of resources and the volatility of the natural world.
Some left-wingers now explicitly use naturalistic arguments to say that we cannot expect to bring poverty to an end, or bring about equality between human beings - two of the great goals of humanists in the past. Consider the words of the British environmentalist Mark Lynas. He said: "The struggle for equity within the human species must take second place to the struggle for the survival of an intact and functioning biosphere." In other words, economic growth and social equality must be put on hold, indefinitely perhaps, because nature will not have it. We have already used up too many of her resources and ruined her biosphere.
Lynas, like Malthus before him, is making a naturalistic case for the inevitability of poverty. He is doing that thing which so enraged Marx when Malthus did it, a couple of centuries ago. He is claiming that poverty has its base in nature.
"We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity", said Sylvia Pankhurst, of leftists, but now that is precisely what leftists do - preach want, scarcity, the idea that natural limits demand that we shrink our eco-footprint, live more meekly, give up on the fight to bring about equity amongst human beings. What an extraordinary sellout. How sad to see leftists doing the very thing that the left was initially founded to challenge, promoting a naturalistic apology for poverty and low horizons.
Some right-wingers argue that environmentalism is a clever cover for promoting socialism, for sneaking left-wing values into power through the back door. It's no such thing. On the contrary, the rise of environmentalism on the left signals the end of centuries' worth of radical left-wing thought. And today a new generation of radicals who want to change the world for the better will have to challenge these left-wing greens and their naturalistic nonsense, just as surely and comprehensively as Marxists challenged Malthusians in the past.