Involving Anthroponomy in the Anthropocene

On Decoloniality

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351000215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book introduces the idea of anthroponomy – the organization of humankind to support autonomous life – as a response to the problems of today's purported "Anthropocene" age. It argues for a specific form of accountability for the redressing of planetary-scaled environmental problems.

The concept of anthroponomy helps confront geopolitical history shaped by the social processes of capitalism, colonialism, and industrialism, which have resulted in our planetary situation. Involving Anthroponomy in the Anthropocene: On Decoloniality explores how mobilizing our engagement with the politics of our planetary situation can come from moral relations. This book focuses on the anti-imperial work of addressing unfinished decolonization, and hence involves the "decolonial" work of cracking open the common sense of the world that supports ongoing colonization. "Coloniality" is the name for this common sense, and the discourse of the "Anthropocene" supports it. A consistent anti-imperial and anti-capitalist politics, one committed to equality and autonomy, will problematize the Anthropocene through decoloniality. Sometimes the way forward is the way backward.

Written in a novel style that demonstrates – not simply theorizes – moral relatedness, this book makes a valuable contribution to the fields of Anthropocene studies, environmental studies, decolonial studies, and social philosophy.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA)

1 How should I engage in community politics?

Eight P.M., Sunday, home, Shaker Heights, Ohio

How troubled my mind has been recently, even last night as I slept. I dreamed fitfully. Like a drip from a faucet in the night, the doomsayers unsettled me, telling me that everything human is up in the air; civilization as we know it is finished.¹ But the problem is: I do not think that this global “civilization” is civilized.

I don’t know if our globally interconnected order has even the requisites of a civilization. Actually existing global capitalism isn’t a society; it feeds on culture, imitating one; and to call it “advanced” is offensive to morality.² Global capitalism’s “planetary” flows are even less civilized, no matter how socially organized their unintentional and negligent production.³ Can we speak of “civilization” when we face an impersonal, acquisitive inertia?

Moreover, people have been living under the once-and-still colonial world system’s hegemony for centuries. The shape of the international order bears the structure of European colonialism. Self-determination struggles arise in the terms of the nation state, the political form that structures international order, rather than in the terms of indigenous political organization. And there are many still-colonized nations where indigenous communities live under colonial states. My nation state is one of these colonizers.⁴

Looking at my own nation, the United States of America, I see the extraction of resources from lands and the capture of people for labor trailing back to when the first colonial conquests began. Some of my nation’s most eloquent writers have spoken out at length about the enduring effects and persistent patterns of this colonialism.⁵ It is hard to fear the loss of a “civilization” that has never been civilized.⁶

Still, the doomsayers are voicing a truth that needs to be heard: our planetary environmental situation is precarious.⁷ Global political economic disorder appears insufficient to address it.⁸ Yet not even social science can predict a truly political event, a revolution, say, or a collapse. It can explain much in retrospect, and it can help us conceptualize the paths actually existing societies seem likely to take.⁹ One has to be careful with sooth-saying – not because it is depressing, but because it is metaphysical in the objectionable sense Immanuel Kant took on in the Critique of Pure Reason at the dawn of the critical age of European modernity. Sooth-saying slips into knowing beyond its bounds. It stands on the one side of Kant’s Third Antinomy of freedom verses determinism, claiming that society is determined.¹⁰ But this is to overlook the power of reflective consciousness and organization to open up possibilities in society for living. We shouldn’t assume that we are blithely free – that would be objectionably metaphysical too – but neither should we write as if humans from this point onward are unable to change the world. The question is how to relate to the truth of our precarity without becoming fatalistic or all-knowing.

That being so, I think it’s actually immoral to act as if we can’t change this world, at least if intrinsically fallacious determinations lead us to think that our decisions don’t matter, here and now. When it comes to my own life, I don’t have the moral opportunity to focus on doom, much less the loss of a wicked civilization. I have a different problem: apathy caused by not knowing how to be, how to respond to the situation my wicked civilization is in. This is not a problem of nihilism, of meaninglessness. It is a problem of disorientation. I’m looking for how we ought to change the world and for the direction in which to head. The grief I may feel for the losses we are likely to face and for the load of delusion we’ve been fed by a wicked order is real, but it must become part of living. I have moral relations I cannot let go.

I want to know where we should be aiming as people. I want an idea to organize my action and shed light on what should be, not what is. At the beginning of the day and at its end, I have to be accountable to myself – to what I know is right. I can’t just sit by knowing that I should do something but not having a clear idea of what it is. I know that I am responsible to make things better, not sit idly by – or sink into resignation.¹¹

There is a kind of apathy created not by loss of heart but by conflict and confusion.¹² I know that we who live in this actually existing global economy and its colonial state systems, especially all who will be affected by it, are morally required to construct a different world. I am apathetic, because it is hard to see clearly how I should think about that world, what ideas I should find morally acceptable to animate my pursuit of it. The apathy interferes with my accountability, as if I were a fibrillating heart.

When people watched television through antennas on the TV set, sometimes two channels would cross over each other, creating a screen split by competing images, disrupted and starred with static. My apathy is like that.

The problem I’m facing is a specific kind of utopian problem. To say that something is “utopian” is to say, literally, that it exists “without a place” – nowhere. The different world that I should be working toward is utopian not simply because it does not exist yet, but because I do not have an idea of what kind of world it should be. Perhaps others do, and I must seek them out. But tonight, I want to see what I can do to clear my mind myself.

I find myself acting on the edge of pointlessness. There is something that has to be done. Not to try to figure it out makes it hard for me to face myself. One point in struggling is to have some integrity.¹³ The point is to try to use my life for some good, even if I cannot see my purpose clearly. To not try would be to be a bad member of my generation.¹⁴ Even more minimally, the point is to help show others, better positioned than me up ahead, how to try – or how not to! The point is to spur some imagination of a different world. The point is all of these things and more – for instance, to produce some change during my lifetime, even if it isn’t sufficient. That would be a partial success and a partial failure. Still, I do not have a clear idea of the different world we should construct. Maybe others do.¹⁵

Being alone in this fibrillating state makes me angry. Anxiety reveals the possibility that the norms of the world are up in the air and suddenly appear contingent. Some even call this anxiety an “experience of freedom.”¹⁶ I think of it as a dim awareness of our power to construct what makes sense in our own terms. My anxiety concerns a political problem. We do not have to be here in this so-called “civilization,” but we are here because of norms upheld and decisions made across societies. It’s facile to say that we could simply choose a different world as if consent is all that is the issue, but we enact the world that we think makes sense and we are responsible for asking whether our world does make sense. We are accountable to the realization that it might not. This anxiety is underneath everything, the ever-present possibility that our society could be otherwise and is contingent.¹⁷

Many of the processes in my society – and in societies bound by shared systems around the world – are shifting the organization of the biosphere – altering the rules of life – and will change the geology of our planet.¹⁸ These changes include global warming, the risk of a mass extinction cascade, and the pervasiveness of industrially produced toxins throughout the biosphere. They include the expansion of industrial animal farms for meat and dairy and the accumulation of plastics within soils and waters on a scale exceeding the imagination. They include many more changes, too. We are said to be entering the “Anthropocene.”¹⁹

The “Anthropocene” is a marker for a bundle of biochemical, biological and imminent geological effects, systematically interconnected, which appear to be an unforeseen consequence of human civilization as such. So the story goes, humankind has caused the Earth to reorganize as if a trauma occurred to a system, as if we were a gigantic meteor, oxygen in an anaerobic planet, or some such geological force.²⁰ Now we are responsible for something for which we didn’t know we could be responsible.²¹ Now we change the rules of life on Earth despite our intentions, alter the whole planet without purpose. What is worse, our record says that there will be little but chaos in the end.²²

But our record? I have doubts about the word being hurled into our life – the “Anthropocene.” It speaks for all of humankind. According to it, humans – anthrōpos, human being in Greek – are the cause of the effect that the name marks.²³ Clearly, though, that is an obfuscation of the truth, and those of us who want to tell the truth shouldn’t be saying it.

Only some societies – and in particular, some specific systems – have generated the big problems that are most commonly discussed in explaining the “Anthropocene.”²⁴ A world caused this, not the world. Industrial energy driven wantonly on by capitalism has largely driven global warming.²⁵ Large scale monocultural agriculture, deforestation, factory farming of meat animals, overhunting and overfishing, the prevalence of industrial toxins throughout the biosphere, and habitat destruction caused by expanding u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: on the essay form
• 1 How should I engage in community politics?
• 2 How should I relate to colonialism?
• 3 How should I understand my responsibility and show it?
• 4 How should I respond to the “Anthropocene”?
• 5 How should I involve anthroponomy in the course and prospect of my life?
• 6 What could others make of anthroponomy and how can I support them?
• In Belle Valley
• On the Farm:
• Glossary
• Index