Roger Hallam, HMP Wayland
The Enlightenment’s drive to modernity is based on the scientific understanding that a physical world exists around us. It has laws and is still there even if you don’t want it to be. This leads to two meta-developments: first, that we can manipulate this world, we can change it to our ends – to have material prosperity, more stuff, more freedom. Second, we can identify objective injustice, and this can be changed. If people are exploited or have a lack of opportunity then that can be changed. It is the glorious story of progressive materialism. Rock on, as those Enlightenment thinkers said (in their own way). The old superstition of the static divine order was gone, gone, gone.
And yet the great paradox of our late modernity, as it is ominously called, is our flight from the real, from the material. This, again, takes two forms. First, our separation from real, actual stuff. Our lives deal with information, ideas, digits, and screens – a world of the immaterial. Secondly, this leads to the notion of the postmodern, where we can have anything, because “I am worth it.” I can take that plane journey, I can eat meat, because, well, I can. There are no limits.
But what is new is that the material boundaries of our earth system (the biosphere, the habitable world: our one and only home) have been crossed. We passed +1.5°C of heating this year. Temperatures are going up 0.3°C a decade and the rate is increasing. Between 2035 – 2040 we will have passed +2°C and a quarter of the planet’s landmass will be uninhabitable. That means one billion refugees and a resulting permanent global economic depression for everyone else. The probability of mass death, every year, from a wet-bulb event will be too high to risk throwing the dice on it, a one in six chance. You wouldn’t put your kids on a plane if there were a 10% or greater chance of it crashing. Do you think people are going to stay in the Persian Gulf if there’s a 10% risk of dying each year, killed by six hours of 50C heat combined with fatal humidity?
We are told that emissions need to be halved by 2030 to prevent this catastrophe. Global carbon emissions are still going up. We have 4–5 years of continuing at present global emission levels before we run out of the budget for 2°C. We are not going to make it for two reasons. First, because the decarbonisation industry is pushing a lie. Its budgets do not take into account the locked-in add-ons: the heating effect of reducing air pollution, the carbon lag, the melting sea ice, the forest fires, and the methane release from tropical wetlands and the permafrost. All of this will take us over 2°C even if we stop emissions tomorrow. Second, the system will not stop emissions tomorrow because those are the (fiscal) rules. And rules, as all the little Eichmanns of this world know, are there to be obeyed.
What has happened then is that the modernist project has come full circle. From rebellion against the divine order, the dogma of the church, through to the glorious project of material progress, and now back to the postmodern divine dogma, where our elites think we can have what they want because we have somehow transcended the material.
This is Labour’s fatal flaw. The Party is led by the greatest fanatics of the postmodern world order – not the established elites, but those from ordinary backgrounds, from the pebble-dash semi-detached houses, whose collective ego is wedded to proving they, too, can be as competent and successful as the masters they aspire to join – the blind enthusiasm of the house slave.
But they are getting on the bus just as it goes over the cliff. Bad luck, eh? As Sir David King said in a recent Guardian article, if we reach our net-zero targets by 2050, then maybe some of humanity will survive to deal with ever-greater climatic extremities. He omitted, in classic British understatement, to mention what will happen to the billions that won’t survive. They will be starved, raped, and then die.
Hasn’t The Economist, in its headline article a few weeks ago, already predicted 2 million in Sudan dying by the end of the year from hunger? Isn’t Tom Tugendhat, one of this year’s Tory leadership hopefuls, on record as saying that UN officials told him, “If you think Syria was bad, wait until 500 million people flee from the Sahel”? Wasn’t it reported at a recent NASA conference that the Amazon has passed the tipping point? The former scientific advisor to the UK government, The Economist, prospective Tory leaders, NASA – don’t kill the messenger.
This is just the beginning. This is what it means to live in the material world.
The Labour Party thinks we can get on the bus without going over the cliff – that it does not have to be straight with the British public about the fact that its “decarbonisation plan” is too little, too late. It has the quaint idea that the material can be bent to the needs of the political. It cannot. But to admit this would mean social death for those who have built their whole world around the postmodern faith. They cannot, and so will not, change.
But as good materialists, we know what happens to superstition. It is found out to be wrong. The real question then is: “What comes next?”
