Concept Anthropocene and impact on our ecosystem. Light display illustration of human activities at Cloud Forest Gallery in Garden by the Bay, Singapore, Feb 11, 2018. Photo: Solomakha /shutterstock.com
It is sixty years since nuclear disaster was narrowly averted during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The unwelcome return of the nuclear threat surrounding the war in Ukraine joins another existential threat to humanity—the climate crisis. This invites us to reflect on what has changed in the political and historical understanding of humanity between the 1962 crisis and now.
Nikita Khrushchev’s gambit of placing Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles on Cuban soil almost brought the Cold War to a boiling point. But the historical heritage of that event is now often seen as a positive one: nuclear disaster was ultimately averted. As an example of diplomatic tightrope walking and game theory scenario predictions, the 1962 crisis now stands for strategic, rational decision-making in the face of catastrophe. There was also a much more prosaic logic at play: in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the disastrous stakes of nuclear war were patently clear to all. But as the United States and the Soviet Union had ideological moral claims pertaining to the whole of humankind, responsibility for nuclear holocaust was equally unimaginable to both sides.
The recent military setbacks suffered by the Russian army in Ukraine, coupled with growing domestic pressure on Vladimir Putin, have raised concerns that the Russian president might use tactical nuclear weapons to decide the war. According to US President Joe Biden, the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” is now officially at its highest level since the 1962 crisis. That we are once again contemplating the danger of a nuclear conflict does not mean, however, that we are unwittingly repeating history. This recent nuclear threat joins another existential crisis we face today—the climate crisis—whose calamitous effects become clearer to us all with every passing year, though the devastation it entails will be more gradual and geographically uneven. Furthermore, soaring energy prices after the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reveal just how much these two registers are connected. But whereas there is universal consensus on the need to avoid nuclear war at all costs, the same does not hold for the climate crisis. The reason for this seems to lie in the way in which, since the early seventies, the idea of universal humanity and its relationship to history has been fundamentally challenged by two factors: the rise of planetary thinking and identity politics.
Over the past fifty years, our understanding of human history has been entirely transformed with the ascent of planetary and ecological thinking. What was once termed “modernity” is now increasingly viewed through the prism of natural history, as a distinct geological epoch—the Anthropocene. The rise of postmodernist thought, the impact of decolonization, and the ubiquity of critical theories of race and gender have been invaluable in framing progressive political discourse of the left since the late sixties. Yet the rise of identity politics has also contributed to the decline of a universalist left and its sweeping view of history.
This universal sense of a collective “we” has been in steady decline for the past fifty years. The collapse of communism did not signal the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama famously suggested, but it did usher in our current era as one increasingly marked by the end of historicity, insofar that history is hardly used to make sense of the present. One of the defining ideas of modernity was that our relation to the past holds the key to unlocking our future. But, as the utopian promises of both sides in the Cold War waned, so did the purchase of a humanist, universal history. Instead of a single triumphant liberal universalist ideology setting the tone, we now find ourselves in a highly globalized world that is also politically fragmented. Paradoxically, however, the notion of an all embracing “humanity” is being contested just when collective action is needed the most in the face of climate disaster. Universalist claims to human agency are now often met with scorn—for good reason given the historical oppression that was carried out in the name of Western universalism. And yet the climate crisis shows that human agency matters a great deal. After all, the Anthropocene is a geological age that coincides with historical modernity, and it was caused by an unprecedented planetary agent—humankind. While it is tempting to opt for the prevalent ahistorical, normatively neutral species-thinking of natural science, the truth is that it falls short when it comes down to conceiving collective political action on a global scale.
Two recent books about the climate crisis point to the limitations of science in solving political problems. In An Inconvenient Apocalypse, the renowned agronomist Wes Jackson and the journalist Robert Jensen join forces as they seek to bridge the gap between science and politics. They aim to recuperate the universal “we” of humanity, which has all but disappeared from contemporary academic and political discourse, as the first step to counter the climate disaster. Based on their—somewhat reductive—view of human history as a quest for “energy-rich carbon,” they argue that the planet simply cannot sustain the current population growth and economic growth. From this they conclude that active “population reduction” is inevitable, which is a political issue par excellence and one above which the threat of coercive genocide looms large—a fate they say can be avoided with progressive universalist politics.
Their view is somewhat problematized by the environmental scientist Saleem Ali, whose recent book Earthly Order is an explicit attempt at making climate science more accessible to the average reader so as to affect political change, which at the same time points to structural limitations that preclude Jackson and Jensen’s species notion of “we”. Ali is unwavering about the need for growing reliance on nuclear energy while suggesting that autocratic regimes like the one in China are more effective in countering the climate crisis due to their capacity for long-term planning and lower dependency on short-term election cycles that hamper effective climate policy in democracies.
Jackson and Jensen conflate human and natural history when they reduce human history to a quest for carbon. This limited view of history cannot explain why we ought to choose a democratic form of deliberation. Likewise, though their entire argument relies on the fruits of modern science, the shared origin of the universal validity of science and the form of politics they advocate remains tacit. The Agricultural Revolution cannot explain the emergence of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions in the West nor the rise of democracy in ancient Greece. These are intrinsically historical questions. This issue resurfaces in relation to Ali’s provocative point about the comparative advantage of autocracies in implementing sustainable climate policies. There is no doubt that the future of humanity on this planet will be largely decided by China, which—with its declared goal to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060—has done in recent years more to counter the climate crisis than any country, and with great efficacy. But one wonders if this is really because of the country's autocratic political system, or perhaps because it has arguably the last regime in the world that still takes its national historical past very seriously as it seeks to shape and realize the national future. However, the operative word here is “national.” The Chinese regime’s vision is not one of universal humankind despite its repeated reference in recent years to humanity as a “Community of Common Destiny.” This term seems to have more to do with China’s hegemonic aspirations in the global order rather than its commitment to universalism—as evidenced by China’s growing enclosure and withdrawal from the international order since COVID-19.
Lacking a clear political vision for the future is exactly what both books warn us about, and yet both fail to recognize that the solution to this impasse must entail a combination of natural history and human history for the marriage of natural science and politics to succeed.
The war in Ukraine has brought the history of the twentieth century back to the fore as it has forced the international community to come together and act responsibly to prevent the conflict from escalating into a nuclear one. Let it serve as a reminder of what in 1962 was taken for granted: that the fate of humanity transcends ideological differences. And in the face of destruction of our own doing, our fate still lies in our hands.
Jackson, W. and Jensen, R. An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity, University of Notre Dame Press, 2022.
Ali, Saleem H. Earthly Order: How Natural Laws Define Human Life, Oxford University Press, 2022.
Aner Barzilay is a philosopher and intellectual historian who is currently a Global Perspectives on Society fellow at New York University Shanghai. He was a visiting fellow at the IWM in 2022.
