The purpose of this website is to invite a conversation about climate change and democracy. Climate change requires that we get our act together as a collective species. That requires, in the first place, acknowledging that from birth to death we are collective, interdependent, symbiotic beings. We cannot be otherwise. The question is what kind of collective, not whether to be collective or something else. To state my answer bluntly, I share the position of those who hold that the threat to planet earth posed by climate change requires democracy. Furthermore, because climate change is only one manifestation of a planetary-wide threat, it requires democracy on a planetary scale.
But aren’t we already committed to democracy? No. Our democracies have always been compromised at their root, professing universality but always including only some and excluding others, violently, claiming dominion or supremacy or superiority over others – based on religion, class, race, gender, merit, or some other otherness.
I am using the word “democracy” to refer to a world incompatible with domination, a world in which neither of two parties can dominate the other, where everyone has equal access to the tool of government, shares ownership of public life and is recognized as a co-creator of the common world. Note that I am using the word “parties” here to refer to individuals or collectivities, whether grouped by politics, gender, race, class, “identity,” or any other division such as “winners” versus “losers,” “elites” versus the “masses,” domination by any “us” versus “them.”[1]
The question, in other words, is simple: either domination or equality. The challenge we face today, I suggest, is whether to go along with the collective forms being imposed on us globally, as a species, by privatized, anti-democratic powers drawn from the wealth classes that have taken increasing control of public institutions everywhere, or breathe new life into the traditions of experiments in democracy. In other words, the threat of climate change demands a new birth of democracy, a “demo-genesis” that extends to all the peoples of planet earth.[2]
Gratitude versus fundamentalizing
I approach this project from an inter-generational standpoint. First, as the grandfather of a fourteen-year old granddaughter. She belongs to a generation that will inherit this beautiful, threatened earth in the condition we leave it. Second, the source of my commitment to democracy has its roots in my formation in the early twentieth-century world of Christian “fundamentalism,” a worldview I inherited from my parents.
Both my mom and my dad approached life with what I felt was a deep, genuine sense of gratitude. Not gratitude because they considered themselves better than anyone else or superior to others. I do not share my parents’ belief that they knew the ultimate source of life. But neither do I believe such knowledge is necessary for the simple recognition that each of us is heir to the shared heritage of the human species; that this common heritage of life stretches back thousands of years; and before that to the billion-year history of a planet, supporting an unimaginably rich diversity of life in symbiotic relationship with one another and the earth itself. Such ultimate knowledge is not necessary to acknowledge that what we receive over the course of a life far outweighs what we earn or give back.
Another way to put it is to say that “history” is a word for an inexhaustibly rich common inheritance that no one living can claim credit for. The more we learn about these rich layers of sediment of the past that have made possible our experience today the more humbling. The gift of this shared past is the capacity to become co-creators of a common world, the bedrock promise of a democratic order. Democracy flourishes in a climate of gratitude.
My parents’ beliefs fit the fundamentalist Christian creed down the line. But they did not fundamentalize their beliefs, become militant, arrogant, or domineering in their attitude towards others. They did not seek to impose their beliefs on others. They did not seek domination over anyone in the name of their beliefs. However my convictions about the evil of anti-democratic domination have been shaped by subsequent experiences of fundamentalism, not only Christian, and not only religious. I have come to draw a distinction between fundamentalist beliefs and a fundamentalizing attitude towards those beliefs. For example, no less an authority than a former governor of the Bank of England has described dominant beliefs in the market as “market fundamentalism.” What he means, I suggest, is that those beliefs have become fundamentalized by many authorities.
To fundamentalize, I propose, is to politicize a set of beliefs, to weaponize them, turning them into the one view of the world that everyone must believe or be considered an outsider or worse. To put it another way, to fundamentalize is to claim monopoly over some truth that affects the whole world. A fundamentalizing attitude is antithetical to democratic liberty. It has a tendency to seek supremacy. I have come to think of domination, whatever its forms, as fundamentalizing.
Anti-democracy today in the U.S.
In the U.S. today there are three powerful movements at war with democracy. First are out and out anti-democratic white racist movements and other right-wing fringe groups, empowered by the outgoing President in the last four years. Second is the leadership of the most vocal, visible well-organized, public Christian bloc which is explicitly anti-democratic; that is, it is dedicated to Christian domination or theocracy, that would subject everyone to its version of Christendom. William Barr belongs to this constituency.
Third is the interest group drawn from the ranks of the wealth class making up the leadership of the giant, private corporate collectives that have seized dominant monopolistic control of practically every sector of the nation’s life, grabbing up the small fish in each sector. This power elite includes private military forces, weapons manufacturers, private intelligence and security forces, energy, finance, technology, marketing, sales, retail, health, pharmaceuticals, food. It includes the knowledge, information, and communication digital infrastructures of the nation, which means the nation’s most powerful cognitive tools. Even the nation’s institutions of education, from pre-school up to the highest reaches of higher education are in a battle against takeover by the wealthy. Finally, this private, minority wealth class has bought a controlling interest in our nation’s public institutions at the federal level. For detailed documentation of sector after sector see Barry Lynn’s powerful call to action, Liberty from all Masters, 2020, and David Dayen’s meticulous reporting on the ground-level consequences of Big Power in his 2020 book, Monopolized. .
War against collectivity by anti-democratic collectivities
Six years ago Naomi Klein wrote a seminal article on climate change entitled “The Change Within.”[3] She pointed out that the obstacles in the way of acting responsibly in the face of climate change are internal as well as external. The inner challenges, she says, add up to “a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.” In other words, the internal obstacles Klein talks about are our attitudes towards one another, how we think and feel towards ourselves, towards one another, even the very words we use to talk about ourselves, such as “collective” and “collectivity,” which have become politically charged concepts.
The war against collectivity is being waged, hypocritically, by collectives. These giant corporate collectives, are busy gathering up the reins of all power, public and private, and concentrating it in their own hands, leaving them free to use it in their own interests. They have the audacity to pose as champions of the liberty of the individual against collective power. Instead, they have turned their power into freedom to take dominion over everyone else and every thing. They claim the freedom and dignity of personhood, privacy, and property for themselves alone, splitting the human species of the planet in two, masters and servants, makers and takers, “winners and losers,” so-called white, and so-called black.
Terrestrial citizenship
It is necessary for “us,” Euro-Americans, to recognize that the resources for a planetary rebirth of democratic order, freedom, and citizenship are themselves terrestrial in scope A planetary demogenesis requires recognizing that central features of democracy such as participatory, or representative and responsive government, and traditions of public reasoning can be found in nearly all countries. It also requires acknowledging that, for over five centuries Euro-American democracies have imposed dominating and racist, that is, non-democratic, relationships within their own borders, and racist, imperial, colonial, neo-colonial regimes globally. Furthermore, it is preciselythe populations oppressed by Western, self-contradictory, imperial democracies that have repeatedly produced some of the most articulate champions of a genuinely inclusive egalitarian liberty. Today those voices and movements are multiplying. Joining the democratic cloud of witnesses, heroes and thinkers of the past, are figures suchas the Portuguese scholar Bonaventura de Sousa Santos, who calls explicitly for “democratizing democracy,”[4] and Puerto Rican sociologist Ramon Grosfoguel, who calls for a redefinition of “citizenship, democracy, human rights, humanity, and economic relations beyond the narrow definitions imposed by European modernity” [5]
The conscious inhabitants of the earth share a “self-interest” in the health and well-being of the planet, a lesson the pandemic is making all too plain in this, its second year 2021. The gift of life includes the power to shape the world we live in, a capacity that can be used to destroy as well as to build, to snuff out every ounce of gratitude, hope, joy and replace them with the poison of domination.
One goal of this website is to listen, learn, join, and act, seeking out all those scouts and champions of the dream of egalitarian liberty beyond our borders, that we are taking the lead in betraying. Let’s talk about that together with the hope – and humor – expressed in the title of the podcast, “What could possibly go right?”
[1] I am drawing on Danielle Allen’s 2014 book, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. Allen identifies five attributes of the ideal of equality in the Declaration of Independence: 1) neither of two parties can dominate the other; 2) equal access to the tool of government; 3) egalitarian approaches to the development of collective intelligence; 4) egalitarian practices of reciprocity – receiving from and giving benefits to one another; 5) sharing ownership of public life and co-creators of a common world. This exquisite, passionate guide, not only to the Declaration but also to the meaning of citizenship itself, should be the first required reading in every “civics” curriculum in the country.
[2] I have adopted the term “demo-genesis” from Bruno Latour’s book, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime, p. 180. Latour’s call for “a new operation of engendering peoples” is, as I read it, his central claim in that book.
[3] Naomi Klein, “The Change Within: The Obstacles We Face Are Not Just External,” The Nation, April 21, 2014. This article is available here.
[4] This is the title of a collection of essays edited by de Sousa Santos in 2007, available here. See also the final paragraph of his 2017 book The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, where he says that reinventing democracy and revolution; that is, democratizing revolution, and revolutionizing democracy, will be the subject of his next book (p. 305).
[5] Ramon Grosfoguel, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy, Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(1), 2011.