Modernity and the Climate Crisis
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz examines the history of the environmental crisis with that of modernity.
After three centuries of frenetic modernism, transforming the world and ignoring the environment, crisis has finally arrived. The moment of reckoning has come: we, the ‘postmoderns’, have at last opened our eyes to the consequences of modernity. In this narrative, the notion of risk occupies an important place as it captures the ‘reflexivity’ or involution of modernity which is now confronted with its own creations. If we follow the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, risks have undergone a sudden metamorphosis: they are no longer natural, but products of modernisation; they are no longer localised, but have evolved into global uncertainties; they are no longer mere side-effects of progress, but represent the foremost challenge facing our societies. So, it is said that modernity has become reflexive – in other words, it is now questioning its own dynamics.
The problem with this narrative is not so much that it is false, as that it is so unspecific. Its claim to reveal the deep sources of our ills makes it both intellectually seductive and politically inoffensive. Since it calls everything into question, it strikes at no actual targets. The anthropological categories on which it relies lack any political teeth – indeed, they conceal the forms of production, power and thought that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, led us down the road to the abyss. To build a serious political ecology, it is essential not to confuse the logic of the environmental crisis with that of modernity itself.
As for the idea that we are only today seeing an ecological awakening, this, too, produces a political impasse. Because it erases the reflexivity that existed in past societies, it depoliticises the long history of environmental degradation. Rather, in its emphasis on our contemporary awareness, it tends to naturalise ecological concern and overlook the social conflicts that lie behind it. By presenting a largely hypothetical reflexivity as a latter-day norm, the ‘risk society’ thesis has blurred the connections between past and present, and replaced historical analysis with abstract typologies.
As historians pay greater attention to these questions, they are finding that modernity never had a one-sidedly mechanistic vision of the world, and never shared a unanimous project of technical mastery. Rather, a variety of cosmologies emerged, in which mastering nature did not mean contempt for it, but an understanding of its laws and a willingness to submit to them in order to act in an efficient and sustainable way.
For example, the notion of climate is essential for understanding modern societies’ reflexivity. During the sixteenth century, the concept of climate gained a certain plasticity: while it remained partly determined by people’s respective geographical positions, natural philosophers became interested in its local variations, its transformations and the role of human action in its improvement or degradation. Since the climate retained its capacity to determine human and political constitutions, it became the epistemic terrain on which the consequences of technical action on the environment were thought. The determinants of health and social organisation were no longer simply a matter of one’s place on the planet, but of seemingly ordinary realities (the atmosphere, forests, urban forms, and so on) that it was possible to influence in one way or another.
Historians have also shown the importance of the environmental thinking which emerged from the discipline of chemistry, concerned with the exchange of matter between human society and nature. The nineteenth century was coloured by deep concerns over the metabolic rift between town and country: urbanisation – in other words the concentration of people and their excrement – was preventing mineral substances essential to the fertility of the earth from being returned to the land. All the great materialist thinkers, from Justus von Liebig to Karl Marx, as well as agronomists, hygienists and chemists, warned of the dangers of soil exhaustion and urban pollution.
In the third volume of Capital, Marx criticised the environmental consequences of capitalist agriculture’s great spaces, empty of human beings, which broke the material circulation between society and nature. According to Marx, there could be no ‘getting away’ from nature: whatever the mode of production, society remained dependent on a historically determinate metabolic regime; what was peculiar to the capitalist metabolism was its unsustainable character.
There is no reason to look down on these theories as a kind of proto-environmentalism that would prefigure our current concern for the environment. After all, they determined modes of production that were far more respectful of the environment than our own. For example, historians are also beginning to understand the fundamental importance of recycling in the past. Chiffonnage, that is, the collection of abandoned objects and materials, employed nearly 100,000 people in 1860s France. Bones, rags, metals – everything was resold and reused. Up until the end of the nineteenth century, urban excreta were systematically recycled for agricultural purposes. The city police of the Ancien Régime provide another example. Since their work was rooted in neo-Hippocratic medical notions that made ‘airs, waters, and places’ the determinants of health, they paid close attention to alterations in the urban environment.
Similarly, the regulations on forests and fisheries (Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s statute on water and forests, the Marine Ordinance of 1681) remind us of the state’s involvement in conserving resources and the severe penalties (fines, imprisonment and corporal punishment) that were attached to these environmental rules. Finally, the existence of ‘commons without tragedy’ – the significant fact that communities managed to preserve natural resources (fisheries, forests, pastures) for centuries – bears witness to the ecological intelligence of past societies.
So, when it comes to writing history, it is misleading to tell a story of the Industrial Revolution in which societies unconsciously altered their environments and ways of life, and only later understood the dangers this brought and the mistakes they had made. Past societies did not cause environmental havoc inadvertently, or without contemplating the consequences of their decisions. Confidence in the future could not be taken for granted, and, at each strategic point in modernity, at each point of conflict, ignorance and/or disinhibiting knowledge had to be produced in a calculated way.
Considered in terms of their effects, the disinhibitions, whose history this book follows, generally include all sorts of devices that made possible, acceptable and even desirable the technical transformation of bodies, environments or modes of production. For any innovation of real significance to establish itself, it has to overcome moral reticence, social opposition, vested interests, suspicions, and criticisms of its material and environmental consequences. The confidence that presides over the technical transformation of the world requires theories that blur its meaning and cushion its traumatic impact. After disasters, there is a need for discourses and moral dispositions that will neutralise their effects, playing down their ethical dimensions in order to ensure the continuation of the technological project.
The word disinhibition encapsulates the two distinct phases of technological action: reflexivity and disregard, contemplating danger and normalising it. Modernity was a process of reflexive disinhibition: we shall see how the regulations, consultations, safety standards, authorisation procedures and health surveys that purported to understand and contain risk generally had the effect of legitimising technological faits accomplis.
Finally, the insistence on the smallness and ad hoc nature of these disinhibitions is intended to point out that modernity is not the majestic and spiritual movement that philosophers claim it is. Rather, I would like to think of it as a mass of little coups de force, imposed situations and normalised exceptions. Modernity was an endeavour that had to be brought to fruition. Those who made this happen produced knowledge and ignorance, legal norms and discourses which aimed to establish new sensibilities and new ways of conceiving our lives, our bodies and our relations with environments and objects.
— An edited excerpt from Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. Translated by David Broder
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