Introduction
I’d been planning to read “This Changes Everything (TCE)” for a few months, both because I want to learn more about the climate change issue and because I want to learn more about Naomi Klein’s take on the world. I’ve doing preliminary work on a project of my own on progressive political and policy strategy. (I’m also finishing another book now about sexuality and politics but I always work on two projects at once.)
I finally started the book a week or so ago because my friend Cate Poe invited to join an on-line reading group. I’m only about half way through at the moment so this is a preliminary report, some of my initial thoughts on the book. I normally wouldn’t write anything until I was done with a book and spent a good deal of time thinking about it, but I feel some obligation to Cate to say something sooner rather than later.
I’ve enjoyed the book to this point. Klein is a vigorous and clear writer who has a talent for both analysis and reportage. And she’s also ambitious—her book aims at a comprehensive account of the political circumstances we find ourselves in at the moment and gives us a strategy for both saving the planet from global warming and transformation our lives in a progressive direction. I fully agree with her view that we can’t understand any particular political or policy issue without some grasp of our circumstances as a whole, so it’s enormously helpful to tackle a big sprawling work that really does attempt to survey the state of politics, especially but not only in the advanced world, in this comprehensive way.
Klein’s Achievement
It’s one of the best books I’ve read in a while and one I encourage everyone to read, both because the global warming issue is so absolutely critical and because the book is so good. And I say this even though I already think the book is also dramatically wrong in how it looks at our world and in the political and political strategy it recommends—and I suspect I’m going to come to disagree with it even more the more I think about it.
That I think it is very much wrong doesn’t detract from Klein’s achievement. For one thing, someone needs to be thinking comprehensively about our world, and there is so much I agree with in this book, that the next, hopefully better, attempt to give us a comprehensive view will either owe a great deal to this book or will be the worse for not owing anything to it.
Dualism vs Dialectics
I’m not going to detail all of the disagreements I have with TCE now, in part because doing so would take too long and in part because I suspect that on some issues I’ll change my mind as I get deeper into the book and her argument.
But I can already see one fundamental way in which I think the book goes wrong and I can give a full enough account of why I think that it goes wrong in this way, even in a brief essay.
The basic problem with Klein’s approach, I believe, is that she is a dualistic rather than a dialectical thinker. There are about eight to ten major ways in which Klein thinks everything needs to change. And while I pretty much agree that the world and our lives would be more secure, more humane, more just, and happier if we changed in each of those directions, I can’t agree that our goal should be to shift entirely in the direction she proposes. Rather, I think that a good polity and society—one that not only prevents the potential devastation of global warming but make life better for all of us—would correct the imbalance in our lives and in our political and social institutions. It would try to find a median between the two extremes Klein identifies in each of these areas instead of swinging from one extreme to another. And just as Marx held that the achievements of capitalism as well as the devastation it created was necessary to attain a better world, a more dialectical account of the issues Klein addresses would show us, I believe, that the dangerous extreme we are at in this present moment was, at least in some cases, a necessary outcome of a historical process that can helps us attain the balance we need in the next fifty to one hundred years.
My disagreement is not just about ends but about means. If we understand our current situation dialectally rather than dualistically, we will have a better grasp on the political and policy strategy that can both save the planet and attain justice and the good for human beings. Klein’s dualism leads to a political strategy that is so wildly optimistic and implausible that, if she were right, I’d be in despair.
Our Relationship to Nature
I recognize that my critique is, to this point, almost impossibly vague. So let me immediately make it a lot more concrete, although I’ll do so by looking at the most general way in which Klein things everything must change—our relationship to nature.
Domination in Western Civilization
Klein points out, quite accurately, that Western civilization has long held that nature is a resource for human beings, something to be dominated by us and used for our purposes. That approach to the natural world goes back, at least, to the Biblical notion that human beings are made in the image of God and thus, like God, stand above nature and that God has appointed us to rule over the natural world and use to server our purpose (Genesis 1:26)).
We are, of course, also told in the Bible that we must care for nature as a shepherd cares for his sheep (Ezekiel 34:2–3). And the beneficence of nature is a sign of God’s love, for which the appropriate response is gratitude (Psalm 19:1, 33:5)). The notion that we should dominate over nature is, however, given a different twist in the modern world which emphasizes not the richness but the penury of God or nature’s provision and the necessity of human labor to bring forth the potential in nature (Locke, Second Treatise, ch. 5). And while knowledge in antiquity and medieval times is inseparable from grasping the goodness of the world designed by God for us, the modern understanding of knowledge is reduced to our capacity to transform an indifferent nature for our own purposes. This instrumental understanding of science and technology heightens the centrality of domination in our relationship to nature while diminishing other ways of appreciating nature as well as the claims nature has on us to preserve and enhance it.
Klein is entirely correct to hold that this conception of our relationship to nature is one explanation of why we have been so slow as a civilization to understand and appreciate the damage we are doing to natural world—to its beauty, its capacity to guide and inspire us, and ultimately its ability to survive our onslaught. And, as I’ve emphasized in the book on sexuality I’m writing, Western civilization’s urge to dominate nature is inseparable from both patriarchy and colonialism. So she is very much right to say we need to temper the urge to activity and domination and emphasize, instead, the urge to receptivity and gratitude in human beings (and especially men) if we want to truly save the earth, reduce violence, and embrace equality between men and women, the West and the rest of the world, and rich and poor.
And yet while I agree with this Klein’s analysis to this large extent, I’m troubled by the one-sided way in which she present it. For many reasons, we simply cannot give up the urge to activity and domination. Rather we have to find a balance between these two tendencies in human beings and in our political communities.
Dominating Nature and Saving Ourselves from Global Warming
Why can’t we just give up the urge to activity and domination of nature? Well, for one thing, it will take a great deal of scientific and technological development if we are going to replace fossil fuel energy with renewable energy. Huge efforts to master nature must continue if solar and wind energy are to become as efficient we need them to be to replace coal, oil, and natural gas. And it’s not just a matter of science and technology—the huge solar arrays and the massive number of wind mills we will be required to generate the energy we need. And that will require huge engineering projects of the kind that are utterly unthinkable without not just modern science and technology but the large enterprises, whether private or public, that can mobilize capital and human labor on a huge scale. Similarly, rebuilding our habitations and cities so as to reduce our energy needs will also require both modern science and technology and a huge organizational capacity. And even then, it’s not clear whether we can move quite as rapidly toward a world without fossil fuels if we don’t make use of hydro and nuclear power, at least for the next fifty to one hundred years, and these, too, are not conceivable without the human urge to activity and domination.
That’s not to say that our efforts to move towards radically reduce carbon emissions only requires that side of human beings. We won’t use our technology wisely if we are not motivated by receptivity and gratitude as well. And, indeed, some of the scientific, technological, and organizational innovations we need require us to understand both the natural and human world in a far more holistic and far less domineering way than we have proceeded in the past, one that is attuned to the dangers as well as the benefits of domination and that recognizes that how the natural and human worlds can come undone because of unintended consequences of our actions. New forms of agriculture, for example, are only possible when we try to learn from what nature teaches us instead of just transforming nature as we see it.
But, again, what we need, I believe is not a wild swing from one way of approaching nature to another, but a balanced approach that finds its way between activity and receptivity, domination and gratitude.
Dominating Nature and the Achievements of Humankind
It is not just in our effort to reduce carbon emissions that we need to balance the two tendencies in our nature, but in our whole approach to understanding the relationship between human well-being and the natural world. And it is striking that Klein at no point acknowledges how important the urge to activity and domination has been in elevating and improving not only human life but the natural world. If we want to understand our situation correctly, we simply cannot fail to recognize that the rise of modern natural science and technology as well as capitalism has made possible the extraordinary increase in human productivity that for the first time since the introduction of agriculture, made it possible for human beings to live without any kind of unfree labor, whether slavery or serfdom and that has also gradually reduced the burdens of wage labor. The rise of human productivity and trade has also, at least in the developed world, reduced violence within and between political communities far below levels found in the pre-modern world. And it has made possible the freedom and representative democracy of liberal regimes which, however limited, are a vast improvement over the autocratic, repressive regimes which they replaced. And, of course, the effort to liberate women from millennia of patriarchy is simply unthinkable without either the freedom and equality of liberalism or safe and effective contraception and abortion made possible by modern technology.
And please don’t tell me that we didn’t need modernity because humanity took a wrong turn when we stopped hunting and gathering and adopted agriculture. I don’t think there is much question that, for many human beings, life took a turn for the worse. We don’t really know whether hunter-gatherers were pacific or violent, egalitarian or hierarchical, patriarchal or matriarchal or something in between. My strong suspicion, based on the little reading I’ve done in the literature, is that just like the hunter-gatherers that remain today, human groups were enormously diverse in our pre-history. But whatever the answer, how many of us are ready to say, even knowing the suffering of human beings due to war, oppressive regimes, slavery and serfdom, and the satanic mills of early capitalism, that we are sorry that humanity took this turn? How many of us ready to say that the human self-consciousness that comes with the political, moral, and scientific knowledge we’ve generated in the last two thousand years is not of transcendent importance? How many of us would prefer to live in a small hunter-gather communities with no Mozart and Beethoven, Beatles and Miles Davis, Shakespeare and Beckett, Plato, Aristotle, and Wittgenstein, Rembrandt and Picasso, Darwin and Einstein?
A More Dialectical Approach
What we need, then, is to find the right balance between the two tendencies in human beings, not the replacement of one by another. We need, in other words, not dualism but dialectics, not a Manichean view that sees one tendency in human nature as good and the other as bad, but a nuanced, sophisticated understanding of how the two tendencies in human nature and political communities have costs and benefits, and a dialectical view that enables us to understand both how we have benefitted by the urge to domination and why, because of it, we not only must, but have the capacity to elevate the other side of our nature and temper the urge to master the world with the compassion and wisdom that comes from gratitude for all that we have been given.
Dialectical Approach and Political Strategy
And this balanced, dialectical view is not only necessary to devise the institutions, practices, and policies that will save the planet and improve human life but also to build the political power to create them. Perhaps Klein thinks that a Manichean, dualistic approach is necessary to build the political support that addresses the dangers of CO2 accumulation, unfettered capitalism, inside politics, and the urge to dominate the natural world. Perhaps she thinks that only a one-sided presentation of our situation can generate the commitment on the part of the activists we need to create the kind of movement(s) equal to the challenge of the moment. But my fear is that for every activist this approach creates we lose ten potential supporters who might who join us if the activists didn’t tell them that everything needs to change. I simply do not see how a mass movement can be built that totally rejects the institutions and practices, and assumptions about how we relate to nature and each other, that are a product of a thousand years of human civilization. If there is anything I’ve learned as a political activist over the years it is that one mobilizes people by a clear goal that they can see is immediately important, by a policy approach that does not threaten to upend their lives, by a political strategy that they can see makes sense, and by a vision of step by step progress that leads from victory to victory. A political program that calls for total transformation of how we live meets none of those criteria and has no chance of building a large, effective movement. A political program that calls for rebalancing our lives, one that points to the one sided way in which our civilization has developed, has the potential to resonate with millions of us who understand in our deepest experience that we have too often ignored the costs as well as the benefits of our technological civilization.
Indeed there is no reason why we can’t appeal to people who don’t totally share our concern with the costs of technological civilization by pointing out that a program to save the earth relies on, and seeks to reconcile, both tendencies in human life. Solar energy and wind energy is, as I’ve pointed out both a huge technological achievement and a way to reconcile with nature. Do we really want to limit the appeal of a program to deal with global warming by only appealing to one side of our culture and nature? And do we want to turn so much against technology that we empower people who object to the necessary scale of solar and wind projects or who will not even consider the nuclear and hydro power projects that might well be necessary to help us transition to a world without fossil fuel?
Dualism and Dialectics: Policy
Klein’s argument is not just one-sided with regard to the global issue of our relationship to nature. The same dualism affects almost every part of her argument, both with regard to policy and politics.
Government vs Markets
Klein rightly points to the disastrous impact of free-market ideology, which tells us that there is no good that can’t be better delivered better through an unfettered market than any kind of government program, whether it is government provision, regulation, tax, or subsidy. There simply is no question that this ideology endangers the earth, undermines community and exacerbates inequality. But to go from that extreme to the other and criticize any use of the market in pursuit of progressive political and social ideals is crazy. Do we really have to re-fight the battles of the twentieth century in our efforts to save the planet? Do we have to forget all we have learned about the circumstances in which government provision of goods and regulation don’t work and some judicious combination of taxation, subsidy, and regulation can make markets work for all of us?
Klein acknowledges that that market-based effort to reduce the impact of acid rain in the United States worked well. So why, when she criticize carbon taxes or cap and trade, does she reject these approaches entirely, as opposed to the problematic ways in which they have been implemented? Her complaint that cap and trade offers businesses a “license to pollute” is just a tired rhetorical complaint against a program that can, more efficiently than others, reduce CO2 emissions while, as she insists we must, making the polluters pay.
Decentralization vs Centralization
What’s even more problematic is that Klein’s preference for decentralized rather than centralized solutions conflicts with her abhorrence of markets. Those of us who called for participatory democracy in the 1960s came to recognize that the most effective way to coordinate the decentralized, workers controlled enterprises that we believe can provide both public and private goods is through well regulated markets, not through bureaucratic regulations that stifle innovation and undermine local and worker initiative. And, of course, we also recognized that while there is much wrong with centralized approaches, there were some problems that could not be solved at the local or regional level but need national or international coordination. Once again, Klein’s Manichean approach encourages us on the one hand to move from our overly-centralized world to a much more decentralized world while, on the other hand she points out that some of our goals can only be met with national and international coordination.
Dualism and Dialectics: Politics
Inside and Outside Politics
Similarly, when it comes to politics, Klein’s dualism leads to implausible political recommendations. I am a practioners of outside politics. There is no question that without a strong public movement or advocacy campaign, the decisions made by government officials are far more likely to benefit special interests and corporate concerns (which are not, pace, Klein the same thing). But outsides politics is far more effective if it is allied with sympathetic insiders and there are many of them in the Democratic Party. It is simply wrong to hold that the Democratic Party or left-liberal parties in other developed countries are so captured by corporate interests that we can’t work effectively within it. Like most leftists, Klein fails to recognize that the weakness of the left in America has much more to do with our anti-majoritarian political system and the difficulties that race and feminism have created for Democrats in winning the vote of working class white males, than with the influence of the corporate elite on the Democratic Party.
Finding Allies
It’s also a problem to say that we face a stark choice between working in opposition to or with capitalists. There is no doubt that the energy industry will fundamentally oppose any serious effort to reduce CO2 emissions. But corporations don’t die and the long term interests of those who own them is tied to the survival of the planet. And that’s especially true for the financial elite who, more than any other capitalists, are inclined to think ahead—and who led the business organizations in the 1920s that recognized that their long term interest required some compromise with ends of labor. In recent years, as the center of gravity of the business community, and even more the Republican Party, has moved from finance capital to extractive capital (and from the Northeast to the Southwest), both of them have adopted a far more radical right wing program than they did in the fifties and sixties. But if the danger of global warming—and effective political leadership—can change anything, one would think it could concentrate the minds of the sectors of the capitalist class that don’t share the narrow interests of the fossil fuel energy industry. They are capable of recognizing that, like the rest of us, their long interest lies in avoiding catastrophic climate change. Despite the growing political and ideological sophistication of the business community in the last twenty years, class solidarity usually takes second place to the self-interest. And unless one is an energy company, it is hard to see how the self-interest of most businesses are served by ignoring the dangers we face from unchecked global warming. Just as we split the drug companies from insurance companies in the fight for the Affordable Care Act, effective political leadership can find ways to exploit differences within the capitalist class.
Why Klein Goes Astray
Given all we have seen is problematic with Klein’s analysis, I’ve wondered how can we account for the strangely one-sided approach she takes
An Uncritical Leftism
Sometimes it seems to me that Klein simply wants to embrace every leftist cause no matter how much they contradict one another. Like the good social democrats who wrote the Gotha Programme that Marx roundly criticized, Klein can’t resist a good left-wing aspiration, slogan or talking point, even at the cost of leaving her argument vulnerable to kinds of rigorous critique that Marx gave to the program of the nascent German SDP. And I say this even though many of Klein’s aspirations are my own. In my academic writing one can find not only a call for overcoming the role of domination in our lives, but arguments for freedom, radical democracy, decentralization, and economic and sexual egalitarianism far beyond anything called by even those on the left today. But unlike Klein, I recognize that these aspirations can’t all be met immediately and, moreover that given the difficulties of political and social life, even a radical turn to the left must find a balance between these aspirations and their opposites. Klein’s Manicheanism leads her to such a one-sided account that at many points in her book I find her undermining my confidence in the ideas we share.
Looking for the Proletariat
But it may be that something deeper is involved. Klein seems to be looking, as so many have done in the last fifty years, for the new proletariat. Much of the appeal of Marxism, after all, was that its prediction about the ultimate success of socialism did not rest on any confidence about the moral appeal of socialism or the effectiveness of socialist parties. Rather it was the naked self-interest of the proletariat that, Marx believed, would lead it out of sheer necessity to play its appointed role in the revolutionary movement. Ever since it became clear that the proletariat would only develop what Lein called “trade-union consciousness” not “revolutionary consciousness”—and even more since working class whites have begun to vote at ever higher rates for right wing parties—leftists have been looking for another group on which to pin its hopes. Klein seems to think that the necessity of saving the world from the destruction of climate change will generate the revolutionary movement that can not only save the planet but attain the broader political goals of the left. She herself tells us that she only became interested in the global warming issue when she recognized that it demanded changing “everything.” So it is no wonder that Klein not only thinks that we have to change everything but that we can build a movement on the basis of the idea she shares with the far right—that it will in effect take a radical transformation of our lives, that is socialism, to deal with the consequences of CO2 pollution. Klein, like Marx, believes that a specter is haunting capitalism and that describing it in the scariest detail not only won’t generate opposition and repression but, because of the sheer necessity of change, will help the left overcome any opposition on its march to victory.
This may be Klein’s biggest fantasy. For the dangers of global warming, unlike the immiseration of the working class in Marx’s theory, is so far in the future and so difficult to see, that there is no reason to believe that any movement can arise powerful enough to overcome the opposition to the changes we must have, as well as those to which Klein aspires. We do need a strong outside advocacy movement. But we need it to be organized and clever enough not only to build a base of public support but to win elections. And we need to couple the outside strategy with an inside one that builds a broad coalition for change. Doing that is only possible if, as I’ve suggested, our movement doesn’t aim at a complete—and frightening—shift from one pole to another but, rather, aims to dialectally combine the extremes between domination and gratitude, government and market, centralization and decentralization, and inside and outside political strategies.
The Struggle Ahead
Of course, I find that an attractive prospect because the kind of political community I think we need, not only to deal with global warming but to realize justice and the common good, is one that seeks such a balance. I also recognize that on my view there is no guarantee that the kind of advocacy movement we need will develop. I can’t share the wild optimism that ultimately underlies Klein’s work. Instead, I’m concerned that what, contra the Marxists, has always changed politics and society—moral energy, strategic analysis, sensible policy proposals that are mutually supporting, and effective organizing and advocacy—may not arise in time to avoid some of the worst outcomes of global warming.
And that is why we all have to join that effort now. And instead of reaching immediately for utopia, we have to do the intensely difficult work of reaching for the next achievement and then the one after that, and then the next one, all the while being guided by a strategy that puts the struggle to avoid climatological disaster at the center of our efforts. We have to count, that is, not on the faux idealism that imagines a great leap into another kind of life, but on the real idealism that enables men and women to work together in the long hard slog to a better world.
Perhaps Klein’s book can help create that idealism. But I’m also afraid that it can undermine it unless we develop her many insights in a more dialectical and less dualistic fashion.