~10: Controversial figures: What Planet of the Humans makes visible, and Yuval Noah Harari's participation in the reinvention of capitalism...
via foresight?
We’re here: Number 10! I said I’d write 10 letters, and this wraps it up.
First off: Contrary to what I initially thought, Planet of the Humans is worth watching.
I was turned off at first by seeing backlash against it. It seems to be common by now, to have heard someone hearing someone say that most of the information is outdated. But I think the technical specifics are not the main argument it brings to the table. The Michael Moore x Jeff Gibbs documentary looks at what’s not being discussed within the (increasingly mainstream sections of) environmental movements: the need to reduce.
What I find most fascinating are the lines that it’s revealing within environmentalism. Eco-modernism treads water with progressive productivism in the figure of the renewables-consultant wearing a Business-As-Usual work outfit, mocking what they categorise as a badly-presented eco-fascist argument by an all-white male crew and mostly white male interviewees. On the other hand, this all-white male crew and mostly white male interviewees points out real anxieties that people who live off the costs that others bear (including the also white consultant), do feel.
Denialism seems like the white (no pun intended) elephant in the room. The climate advocates/reporters I’m reading are sparring over accuracy and precision, and wokeness-quotient, ignoring the main argument and sentiment that the documentary puts forward.
I do not appreciate the documentary’s treatment of population growth—a panel of worried white Americans suggesting the answer is to stop population growth, ignores the intersectional climate justice conversation we need to press towards. But for a documentary that feels like it’s made for people who identify with whiteness (including non-white skinned people), it has the potential to turn people off renewables, if the renewables industry doesn’t address the skepticism it raises—and rightly so—of the trustworthiness of big companies. Making fun of the film’s colour representation and production quality is a poor reading of a piece that intervenes at an important choice point for business, governance, and people. The planet is knocking.
Planets points a way for the conversation to turn away from a new technological fix (such fixes have historically not helped matters), to degrowth. I wish it had actually done that, in the film itself.
Thinking through this point: degrowth has its skeptics, too, so we honestly need more constructive discussion linking technological and policy expertise with practitioners whose work together, culminates in a practice (not vision) of degrowth.
I find it ironic that practitioners are seen as idealists and utopian because they aren’t scaled, and that technologists are seen as practical and fundable even though the most viable thing they sell are often visions of scale. Surely we can create places where the two can meet?
The problem is that the degrowth movement doesn’t seem to have really engaged with practitioners except in terms of scholarship case studies. It’s been mostly theoretical, but it extends beyond the local scale. I’ve been wondering—does the degrowth movement speak to / with Kate Raworth’s doughnut economy model?
I chanced upon a book on degrowth, just published recently:
Scale seems to be at the heart of the ideological divide. People are concerned about the futility of bottom-up actions (many of which are listed in the contents of the book mentioned above)—things like artivism, imagination, care revolution, food sovereignty, people’s actions, free software, open workshops to create infrastructur. The fear is that these aren’t enough.
And that’s fair enough. I don’t think bottom-up action alone can support our needs for material interconnection and scale. But I think a large part of our answer isn’t to be found in the engineering “how” but the socio-emotional “how”. If we don’t see a sea change in how people see their opponents, or talk about detractors, or find ways to adopt trust-based regulatory practices & protocol, we risk greater instability. (We’re already the closest we’ve ever been to midnight on the nuclear clock). Jodi Dean speaks plainly about our challenges, in her proposal that we re-visit the idea of having comrades, not allies:
Those supposed to be on our side are the ones who disparage us the most. The same also happens when momentary issue groups form to plan actions or events. Accustomed to the harms and offenses of capitalism’s mobilized bigotries, we are easily offended and slow to trust others. Appealing to self-care addresses the symptom, but not the cause of our political incapacity. It ignores what we are really missing — a political relation built on solidarity.
— Jodi Dean, We Need Comrades on Jacobin Mag
I think Vandana Shiva might add that we are missing interconnection with the integrity of all beings… but that’s too much for this letter. (You can listen to her here on an excellent recent interview for DiEM25 TV).
Knowledge enables autopoesis …. or not
On the topic of allies, I was reading this post by Finnish foresight group Sitra last month, which I found very interesting.
They and a think tank, Demos Helsinki, see resemblance between their work and that of historian Noah Yuval Harari.
There’s more to say about the implications of a foresight group allying themselves with Harari, whether at face value, or on a deeper level. But I don’t know enough about foresight to have clear thoughts on that yet. I’ll just focus on the short excerpt that Sitra posted of Harari’s writing (again here), and some roadblocks it poses for me, trying to work with his arguments.
Harari uses the example of Marx’s work on capital, class, and revolution to make the statement: that historical analysis is not meant to be deterministic, because look at Marx: his predictions never came true; instead of the proletariats overthrowing the bolsheviks, the capitalists in the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution read Das Kapital alongside the proles and socialists and used the “tools and insights of Marxist analysis” (his words) to pacify the workers. In other words, historical analysis doesn’t do anything except allow society to change. Thus, knowledge is not deterministic, and knowledge is void of ethical responsibility.
He ends with a message that sounds like a call to action—share information, share data so we can better understand and avoid Doom:
This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.
—Noah Yuval Harari
I was excited by this: yes, knowledge may be a form of autopoesis for human societies; to keep changing. So it’s important to keep sharing information and knowledge.
So I tried to write this:
As Yuval Noah Harari points out, knowledge is paradoxical: the more our knowledge changes behaviour, the more quickly this knowledge becomes useless. That sort of makes a case (if we need a case to be made) for writing to these futures, and seeing which ones we really want.
And then I realized—something didn’t feel right.
—
What Harari doesn’t mention is how the Marxist analysis of power holds true anyway. And he’s just made a public case to make new knowledge readily available, ignored the structural ways information is a commodity the elite have greatest access to, and justified that as change for good.
He’s justifying the writing of historical knowledge into accessible text for voluminous consumption (without the tools of analysis) by people wanting to believe in ascendent visions.
Yet, how knowledge changes behaviour doesn’t end in simply, changing behaviour. What happens next depends on what knowledge that is, and in whose hands it is used. Marx’s knowledge became useful to the capitalists too: more useful, because they could now see ahead to diffuse revolutionary sentiment. (Harari himself writes this.)
So I went and looked up Harari to see if anyone’s critiqued his work.
And I found some. Three pieces suggest that not only is Harari’s work deterministic and sweeps over power relations that do exist, he also writes about historical knowledge while making assumptions that are so implicit, that make his more ascendant predictions appealing to the hearts of the global elite.
Surely he knows that—he’s playing the capitalist trump card in knowledge production: sell the dream, make it complex, write a prediction and say predictions are meant to enable alteration of the timeline, but know that either way: he wins. His predictions aren’t going to make people move off them, because he gives us no tools for analysis, no opening, no method for agency. He then gets known for his work, gets invited to speak, and he sits on the right side of the elite knowing he’s handed over the tools of knowledge to these elites.
Jeremy Lent, one of the authors of these critiques, identifies four fictions that turn up regularly in Harari’s writing:
Fiction #1: Nature is a machine.
Fiction #2: “There is no alternative.”
Fiction #3: Life is meaningless - It’s best to do nothing.
Fiction #4: Humanity’s future is a spectator sport.
—by Jeremy Lent here
Believing that nature is a machine inspires a hubristic arrogance that technology can solve all humanity’s problems. And it’s arrogance that will be the death of us, not the technology.
So I do think we’d do well to pay more attention to it.
While the content of his new book is definitely the messy present, Harari continues to view the world as if through a scientist’s objective lens. However, Harari’s understanding of science appears to be limited to the confines of Fiction #1—“Nature Is a Machine”—which requires complete detachment from whatever is being studied. Acknowledging that his forecast for humanity “seems patently unjust,” he justifies his own moral detachment, retorting that “this is a historical prediction, not a political manifesto.”
— Jeremy Lent
Yet, we know that historical predictions are always political.
Already, molecular biologists are promoting genetic engineering to enhance food production, while others advocate geo-engineering as a solution to climate breakdown—strategies fraught with the risk of massive unintended consequences.
When we truly recognize that natural processes, from the human mind to the entire global ecosystem, are complex, nonlinear, and inherently unpredictable, we will see the need to focus on the quality and integrity of each thought, and step, that we take and put out into the world. And while I used to take this with a pinch of salt, I now whole-heartedly believe this. Ask sci-fi writer William Gibson (in this nice interview) about what it’s like to see his fictions create reality.
Our personal thoughts & intentions are not too small, or too insignificant, to spend time on. To focus and intend—that’s the first step of crafting truly systemic solutions to the existential crises facing humans.
Reading list for critiques of Harari:
Points out consistent fallacies in his arguments (++ a recommended reading list for him): https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/unacknowledged-fictions-of-yuval-harari/
Addresses the form of his arguments and its complicity within the liberal elite theatre: https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/MAGAZINE-how-yuval-noah-harari-became-the-pet-ideologist-of-the-liberal-elites-1.6673776
Focuses on the reductions Harari uses in his historical account (and he is, after all, a historian): https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/a-reductionist-history-of-humankind
We’re coming to the end of this Letter #10. I’m thinking about whether to keep writing. Are any of these interesting to you? If you find any part interesting, I’d like very much, to know. You can do so by replying. And, if you liked this particular letter, do share it or forward it to others.
Odds and Ends
What draws us to research? and other inspirations
9:48: a conversation with filmmaker Liu Chuang: “the internal connection between Zomia and Bitcoin mines has always been unclear to us, but it is also what attracts us to keep doing this project.”
Feeling happy during the Coronavirus
Lina Mounzer in Beirut: https://lithub.com/letter-from-beirut-from-revolution-to-pandemic/
And what’s beyond capitalism (not so happy)
Jodi Dean on Neofeudalism: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/
Highly recommended (this isn’t just happy, it’s invigorating)
"Towards a transformation of hope for the earth" with Vandana Shiva and Stefania Romano
Depending on how things go with the coronavirus, I will be doing some work in the coming years that will bring me to Europe, and back to Southeast Asia. I hope to live up to what that work asks of me.
I’m more interested in the line between fiction and non-fiction than ever, and much as I find our current times apocalyptic (it does seem as if my childhood wishes to see apocalypse were rather potent!), it is perhaps an artefact of our times, too, that the rewritability of our pasts and futures seem to be converging, through many peoples’ deeds together.
Take care of yourselves, and the beings and things you love, and thank you for following me on this journey since late 2019. <3 I may write again, but in the meanwhile, I’ll be on Twitter @fuiin!
While I started this as a personal letter to friends, a great deal of what I write about are things I care deeply about. If you find this insightful and would like to share it with others, do share it!
~Huiying