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  Franzen’s core argument not only lacks anything that looks like evidence. It is obviously pursued without any real interest in the politics of climate change. Franzen tells us that at Copenhagen President Obama “was frank about how much action the American political system could deliver on climate change: none. Without the United States … a global agreement isn’t global, and other countries have little incentive to sign it. Basically, America has veto power, and we’ve exercised it again and again.” The clear implication of this passage is that the United States under Obama has made no commitments to emissions reductions. Does Franzen not know that on 12 November 2014, in an historic agreement with China, President Obama pledged a US reduction of carbon emissions of 26–28% below 2005 levels by 2025? I have always imagined that the New Yorker employed a small army of fact checkers. Apparently it feels they are not needed when publishing the work of the Great American Novelist.

  It is not only newspapers that Franzen doesn’t bother to read. Without blushing, he tells us that in general he doesn’t read books about climate change. Recently however a friend recommended Dale Jamieson’s Reason in a Dark Time. Franzen tells us he couldn’t put it down. Why Jamieson’s far from original book appealed to Franzen is apparent from its sub-title: “Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – And What It Means for Our Future.” What Franzen admires about Jamieson’s book is not merely the argument that the struggle against climate change is already lost. He is excited by the cool academic, angst-free, disinterested tone in which the conclusion – that human beings have already decided to allow the Earth to be destroyed for future generations and other species – is reached.

  Franzen tells us that he once imagined that he would find a book that arrived at the view that the Earth is destined for disaster “depressing”. But if anything Jamieson’s conclusion seems to have cheered him up. Even though, he tells us, he is acutely aware of his carbon footprint and, as a residual Puritan himself, has always felt vaguely guilty about it, his reason now convinces him that individual action is entirely useless when it comes to contributing to the solution of the impending climate change catastrophe. Franzen asks: “Shouldn’t our responsibility to other people, both living and not yet born, compel us to take radical action on climate change?” As his personal emissions amount to 0.0000001% of the total, he understands however “that it makes no difference to the climate whether any individual, myself included, drives to work or rides a bike”. What then is to be done? His answer is basically to give up on the issue. “Absent any indication of direct harm, what makes intuitive moral sense is to live the life I was given, be a good citizen, be kind to people near me, and conserve as well as I reasonably can.”

  Franzen’s logic is obviously disingenuous. No one would abandon the fight against racism on the ground that the problem could not be solved by individual acts of kindness to African Americans. But the logic is also revealing. Embedded in hyper-individualist liberal consumer society, it apparently has not occurred to Franzen that commitment to the struggle against the climate change catastrophe is not about private lifestyle choices but collective political activity, or that rather than arguing why we have no alternative to abandoning hope, an author with his kind of public authority might lend his voice to the cause to which public-spirited individuals like Al Gore, James Hansen, Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein have devoted their lives.

  At this point in his essay Franzen reveals one of the elements that is really driving him – his hostility to the climate change movement. Given that a destroyed planet is a “done deal”, he argues that our only real choice is between the “palliation and sympathy” for the Earth shown by the conservationists or the “disfiguring aggression” of the climate activists, revealed in their willingness to force hideous windfarms on the landscape for no better reason than to briefly delay the inevitable arrival of climate catastrophe.

  Franzen has coined an unpleasant term for those who accept the implications of the scientists. They are called “climatists”, as dismissive a term as “warmists” used by those who, unlike Franzen, do not accept the conclusions of the climate scientists. “Like globalism,” Franzen tells us, “climatism alienates.” And not only that. Climatists even threaten the natural world. “As long as mitigating climate change trumps all other environmental concerns, no landscape on earth is safe … Only an appreciation of nature as a collection of specific threatened habitats, rather than as an abstract thing that is ‘dying,’ can avert the complete denaturing of the world.” By now in the topsy-turvy Franzen world view, the disfiguringly aggressive climatists have become the enemies of the Earth. Only the gentle Franciscans like himself, who know there is nothing to be done about climate change, and who offer palliative care to what they love, are its true friends.

  In his wonderful essay on Henry Miller, “Inside the Whale”, George Orwell tells of how he encountered Miller on his way to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Miller told Orwell he was a fool, unless he was travelling to Spain for some aesthetic purpose. Orwell thought Miller was a very important novelist. But he also was perplexed by his indifference to the coming totalitarian world. Miller was, like Jonah, inside the whale, “allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting”. For Orwell this was impossible. “To say ‘I accept’ in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine-guns, putsches, purges …”

  Jonathan Franzen is the Henry Miller of our age. Except that his irresponsibility is more dishonourable because, unlike Miller, he pretends it is occasioned by something admirable, his Franciscan-conservationist love of nature. Franzen describes climate change as not only a tragedy but also as a “weird comedy”. (For my part, I’m afraid, the comedic element contained in the suffering that will be occasioned by a four- or six-degree increase in the temperature of the Earth escapes me.) What Franzen is asking us to do is accept, without fuss, our generation’s willingness to look on passively, even cheerfully, and with a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders, while we watch as our consumer society destroys the material conditions that have allowed human civilisation to flourish over the millennia.

  In the end what Franzen seems to me to be saying is this: The prospect will be grim for humans and other species, but the worst is in the future, there is nothing we can do about it now, and anyhow – and this is what I fear his cultural antennae have picked up and are signalling back to his audience – if we are really honest with ourselves, who really in their hearts gives a damn about the destruction of a once human-friendly Earth? So far as I am aware, no one of his cultural stature has expressed such a “daring” thought before. This is why Franzen’s New Yorker article might tell us something rather unpleasant that we nonetheless need to know.

  The Guardian, 8 April 2015

  LAUDATO SI’: A POLITICAL READING

  When I was young the intellectual milieu was shaped by the need to come to terms with the unprecedented crimes and the general moral collapse that had taken place on European soil following the outbreak of great-power conflict in August 1914 – Hitler and Stalin, the Holocaust and the Gulag, the concentration camps and genocide, the tens of millions of deaths that had occurred in two unprecedentedly barbarous wars. For me the most important book on the contemporary crisis of civilisation was Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, a complex study of racism, imperialism, anti-Semitism and the regimes that had emerged in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The book was important to me not only because of its formal arguments and its insights but because it was written in a tone that seemed, unlike any other work I had read, to have risen to the extremity of the crimes and the breakdown it was struggling to understand and to explain.

  In our own age we are faced with a crisis of civilisation of equivalent depth but of an altogether different kind – the gradual but apparently inexorable human-caused destruction of the condition of the Earth in which human life has flourished over
the past several thousand years, at whose centre is the phenomenon we call either global warming or climate change. During the past decade I have read scores of books and thousands of articles, many outstanding, examining from every conceivable angle and also trying to explain the wreckage we are knowingly inflicting on the Earth. It was however not until June 2015 that I read a work whose tone and scope seemed to me, like Arendt’s Origins, fully adequate to its theme. That work was Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home – in my opinion one of the most important documents of our era.

  There can be little doubt that the papal encyclical is the most consequential intervention in the discussion of climate change since Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. But as an intervention it is of an interestingly different and more radical kind. The implication of Al Gore was that the crisis we were facing had arisen as a consequence of an unhappy but nevertheless innocent accident. The condition of the Earth was under threat because the unprecedented material prosperity of industrial civilisation had been based on the disastrous but unanticipated and unanticipatable consequence of its source of energy – the burning of fossil fuels. Knowing now what we do, all that was required to overcome the crisis, Gore argued, was to replace fossil fuels with renewables – solar, wind, hydro, geothermal. No doubt that transition would be anything but easy and to succeed would require great reserves of political skill and will. For Al Gore the climate crisis was however a mere hiccup in the course of history. Following the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, the fundamental human story – of expanding material prosperity through endless economic growth – would be able to be resumed with its bounty, universalised through the generosity of the developed world, spreading gradually to every corner of the Earth. For Al Gore humankind did face a crisis of the most serious kind. But for him nevertheless, the myth of unending material progress, a core American or indeed Western faith, was untouched.

  The papal encyclical is different. For Pope Francis the climate crisis is only the most extreme expression of a destructive tendency that has become increasingly dominant through the course of industrialisation. Judaeo-Christian thought “demythologised” nature, breaking with an earlier world view that regarded nature as “divine”. But as the industrial age advanced, by ceasing to regard the Earth, our common home, with the proper “awe and wonder”, humans have come to behave as “masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits to our immediate needs”. “Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the past two hundred years.” The vision of the encyclical is not straightforwardly anti-modernist, although I have no doubt that it will be mischaracterised in this way. The advances in the fields of medicine, engineering and communications are welcomed. “Who,” Francis exclaims at one point in the encyclical, “can deny the beauty of an aircraft or a skyscraper?” But for him, in the end, the treatment of the Earth as a resource to be mastered and exploited; the limitless appetite for consumption that has accelerated during the past 200 years of the industrial age and has culminated in our “throwaway culture”; and the most extreme consequence of the contemporary crisis of post-industrial society, the climate emergency, are inseparable phenomena, part of a general and profound civilisational malaise. “Doomsday predictions,” the encyclical claims, “can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth. The pace of consumption, waste and environmental change has so stretched the planet’s capacity that our contemporary lifestyle, unsustainable as it is, can only precipitate catastrophe.”

  Why has this come to pass? The encyclical argues that we have become slaves both to what is called the “technological paradigm” and the theory of market fundamentalism. If the history of the twentieth century proves anything, it is the potential of technology to be deployed to anti-human purpose, as it was with the Nazis in the means of killing, as it is in the modern weapons of war. “Never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely.” Technology has become disconnected from “human responsibility, values and conscience”. Even a lifestyle partially resisting the regime of technology is now described mockingly as “counter-cultural”. Particularly devastating for the wellbeing of both society and the environment is the alliance of convenience that has been forged between technology and economic theory, which serves the interests of the wealthy. The neo-liberal belief in “the magic of the market” ought to have been finally discredited by the global financial crisis. Indeed the encyclical describes it as a theory that “today scarcely anyone dares to defend”. In reality, however, such a belief still dominates daily economic life in practice. “The economy accepts every advance in technology with a view to profit, without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings.” Financiers and technologists are united in “the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit”. Talk of “sustainable development” is “usually a way of distracting attention and offering excuses”, absorbing “the language of ecology into the categories of finance and technocracy”. If technology has captured the economy, in turn the economy has captured politics. The encyclical’s description of contemporary political life in a standard Western democracy is painfully familiar.

  A politics concerned with immediate results, supported by consumerist sectors of the population, is driven to produce short-term economic growth. In response to electoral interests, governments are reluctant to upset the public with measures which could affect the level of consumption or create risks for foreign investment. The myopia of power politics delays the inclusion of a far-sighted environmental agenda.

  As a result of all this, civilisation has been brought to the “crossroads”.

  “Everything,” the encyclical declares more than once, “is related.” One meaning here is the connectedness of our relations with all other aspects of creation – with both other creatures and with the inanimate world of nature. “Each creature has its own purpose … Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God … We can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement.” The connectedness between humans and nature is often captured in a language of great beauty. The meaning of the destruction of coral reefs is conveyed in these words. “Who turned the wonderworld of the seas into underwater cemeteries bereft of colour and life?” In a rather strange but compelling turn of phrase, the encyclical enjoins us to “dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it”.

  But “everything is related” has another meaning. In the contemporary world there exist not “two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but … one complex crisis which is both social and environmental”. The most important connection between the twin social and environmental crises is expressed in these words. “A sense of deep communion with the rest of nature cannot be real if our hearts lack tenderness, compassion and concern for our fellow human beings.” The human family is disfigured by radical inequality. This inequality should arouse our “indignation”. It rarely does. The wealthy are barely in touch with the conditions of life of the poor. If the poor enter into their calculations at all, it is often as an “afterthought”. Conscience has been “numbed”. We are in danger of succumbing to a condition Francis calls “the globalisation of indifference”.

  The two crises – of the environment and of society – are directly interconnected in multiple ways. It is the poorer nations who are already paying and will continue to pay the main price as the climate crisis deepens. One of the reasons for the environmental crisis is the obscene level of consumption concentrated in the wealthy nations and also among the wealthy classes in both the developed and the developing worlds. Some of the wealthy “have not the slightest idea of what to do with their possessions, vainly showing off t
heir supposed superiority and leaving behind them so much waste which, if it were the case everywhere, would destroy the planet”. Corporations remorselessly pursuing profit do not take the wellbeing of the Earth into account. The encyclical enjoins wealthy nations to abandon the ambition of economic growth and assist poorer nations to pursue a growth that is called “healthy”. To make progress in the interconnected struggle against global warming and global inequality, the encyclical also talks of the need for a world political authority. It acknowledges that none of this of course will happen without what the encyclical calls a profound “cultural revolution”.

  The contemporary social crisis is not restricted however to the problem of inequality. There are signs everywhere of spiritual malaise. Societies that are devoted above all else to the promotion of a mythology connecting consumption with wellbeing are perpetuating a cruel illusion. Consumption does not, cannot, bring meaning or even ordinary happiness. In the consumer society, the ills of isolation, depression and anxiety are growing, the ties of family and community are weakening, because of what the encyclical calls “the silent rupture of the bonds of integration and social cohesion”. The “consumerist vision of human beings” is rather a potent leveller of the riches offered by the variety of cultures – “their art and poetry, their interior life and spirituality” – one vital source of human nourishment. Compulsive consumerism creates only a counterfeit conception of freedom. The greed and self-centredness which is instilled by the consumer culture of instant gratification is also incompatible with the idea of “limits” and thus with the idea of the existence of a “common good”. Interestingly, the encyclical argues that it is not the old enemy of the Church, “doctrinal relativism”, but what it calls “practical relativism” that is now inflicting the greater social harm. We are encouraged by the market philosophy not to cooperate but to compete and “for one person to take advantage of another”. Societies are convinced to “allow the invisible forces of the market to regulate the economy, and consider their impact on society and nature as collateral damage”. Sensing imbalance in life, people are driven to a frenetic busyness. “In turn [this] leads them to ride rough-shod over everything about them.” The encyclical characterises the trajectory of contemporary culture with the neologism “rapidification”. As a result of all this, it argues, we have now reached a very strange place where, despite unprecedented material prosperity, “people no longer seem to believe in a happy future”.