Good Interview from 2004

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200407/?read=interview_zizek

I. WHY STALINISM WAS MORE
PERVERSE THAN NAZISM

THE BELIEVER: You have raised many eyebrows with your controversial rethinking of today’s accepted positions in philosophy. For example, you have said that Stalinism is worse than Nazism, despite the grand spectacle of the Holocaust. Can you describe your interest in Stalin here and why you think that his regime is a greater problem philosophically than Nazism?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: It was typical in philosophy after World War II to evoke Nazism and the Holocaust as the most radical evil. You cannot comprehend it with any rational strategy. The idea is also that the experience of the Holocaust is something which undermines the entire traditional philosophy, which was basically the divine regulation, the idea that even if things appear thwarted, failed, and so on, ultimately, in some kind of rational totality, all of these tragedies are relativized as part of a harmonious project. It can be a divine plan; it can also be the development of humanity or whatever. The idea is that the Holocaust cannot be rationalized philosophically here.

Of course, I think that the Holocaust was horrific (my god, it is gross to even have to say that), but for me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem than Nazism. For example, there is a basic difference between Stalinist and Nazi victim status, from a simple phenomenological approach. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. You are guilty for who you are, you are a Jew, you are killed, that’s it. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. Nonetheless, there is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.

BLVR: So your line of questioning is of the functioning of the system?

SŽ: Yes. Why this strange need to make them confess? And why the total absence of this in Fascism? In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being. The very fact that you had to confess makes Stalinism paradoxical and perverse. The idea is that, in a strange way, it admits that you are still a free human being, you had a choice. You are guilty, you have to confess. This does not make Stalinism cause any less suffering; nonetheless, this pure quarrel of radical objectivization, “You are a Jew, you are guilty for who you are,” was absent in Stalinism. In a totally perverted, thwarted, and twisted way, some margin of human freedom was acknowledged under Stalin. So the result is that in Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.

BLVR: So your interest is not to forget Nazism, but to reexamine Stalinism.

SŽ: To put it in simplistic terms, Fascism is relatively easy to explain. It is a reactionary phenomenon. Nazism was some bad guys having some bad ideas and unfortunately succeeding in realizing them. In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers’ uprising; the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong. This is a much greater enigma. The most representative orientation of Marxism in the twentieth century—critical theory of the Frankfurt school—obsessed over Fascism, anti-Semitism, and so on, and simply ignored the topic of Stalinism. Sure, there are a couple of small books, but there is no systematic theory of what Stalinism is. So for me, the key phenomenon to be accounted for in the twentieth century is Stalinism. Because again, Fascism is simple, conservative reaction going wrong. The true enigma is why Stalinism or communism went wrong.

BLVR: Any conclusions?

SŽ: It is very difficult; I am still working on it. My conclusions are not some kind of conservative or liberal vision according to which Stalinism should be pointed out as kind of a logical demonstration of any project of our so-called post-political era: the idea that the time for projects is over, all we can do is accept capitalist world-market economy, globalism, and so on. Today, whenever somebody tries to risk something politically, you immediately get, “Oh, didn’t you learn the lesson from history, this will end up in Holocaust.” This is the eternal topic of modern liberal-conservative skeptics, that the lesson of the twentieth century is that every radical attempt at social change ends up in mass murder. Their idea is a return to pragmatism, “Let’s strictly distinguish politics from ethics, politics should be limited, pragmatic, only ethics can be absolute.” What I aim at in my rethinking of all of these problems is precisely not to draw this conclusion.

II: THE END OF LIBERAL MODESTY

BLVR: So you obviously strongly disagree with this liberal reading of the ideology behind World War II. This leads me to think about how in your work you are known to criticize liberalism, as it is manifested in political correctness, pragmatism, American academia, etc. So would this be your criticism of this way of thinking?

SŽ: First of all, I don’t have any big problems with liberalism. Originally, liberalism was quite a noble project if one looks at how it emerged. Today it is a quite fashionable criticism, with feminists, anti-Eurocentric thinkers, etc., to dismiss liberalism in principle for preaching the equality of all people, but in reality privileging the white males of certain property, addressing automatic limitations.

The next usual accusation is that liberalism is ultimately founded in what the American moral-majority religious Right likes to call secular humanism: the idea is that there is no Supreme Being or mystery in the universe. Their criticism is that this idea—that the ultimate prospect of humankind is to take over as master of his own destiny—is man’s arrogance, criticizing that it always misfires and so on.

First, I don’t think it is as simple as that, for two reasons. It is a historic fact that at the beginning, the idea of human rights and all of those liberal notions, effectively in a coded way implied the exclusion of certain people. Nonetheless, in this tension between appearance and reality (appearance: everyone has human rights; reality: many, through an implicit set of sub-rules, are excluded), a certain tension is set in motion where you cannot simply say that appearance is just a mask of the reality of oppression. Appearance acquired a social emancipatory power of its own. For example, of course at the beginning, women were excluded, but then very early on, women said, “Sorry, why not also us?” Then blacks said, “Why not us?” And workers, and so on. My point being that all of these groups that criticize liberalism emerged out of these early bourgeois liberal traditions. It set certain rules—this tradition of universality of human rights and so on—and in this way it opened up the space. So that is the first thing to say for liberalism.

BLVR: So even though liberalism was started by a limited few, built inside of it is the ability for all others to use it to their benefit?

SŽ: Yes. The second thing to say for liberalism is that originally it was not an arrogant attitude, but it was quite a modest, honest attitude of confronting the problem of religious tolerance after the Thirty Years’ War. In the seventeenth century, all of Europe was in a shock, and then out of this traumatic experience, the liberal vision came. The idea was that each of us has some existential or religious beliefs, but even if these are our fundamental commitments, we will not be killing each other for them. To create a coexistent social structure, a space where these inherently different commitments can be practiced. Again, I don’t see anything inherently bad in this project.

BLVR: Neither do I. But last year I attended a lecture you gave in which you vehemently attacked liberalism. Can you help clarify this for me?

SŽ: The problem that I find today, with liberalism, not economic liberalism, but radical human-rights liberalism, is the philosophical approach. The saddest thing to happen in the last thirty years is the loss of the belief that we had in communism, and even in the social-democratic welfare states of the West, the accepted fact that the fate of humanity is not simply an anonymous fate. This belief that some blind fate does not control us, that it is possible, through human collective action, to steer development, is gone. I think what happened in recent years is that this logic of blind fate returned. Global capitalism is simply accepted as a fact that you cannot do anything about. The only question is, Will you accommodate yourself to it, or will you be dismissed and excluded? A certain type of question, and it needn’t be put in the old-fashioned Marxist way as class struggle, but the general anticapitalist question, basically has disappeared.

BLVR: Generally speaking, yes. But I disagree, as would I think a number of others, that everyone accepts global capitalism. What about the antiglobalism movements that have been taking place all over the world in the last decade? Seattle, Genoa, etc. What do you think of these groups?

SŽ: Now with the antiglobalism movement, they are still, in a limited way, reemerging. But the idea is that the fundamental conflicting areas are no longer those of vertical up-vs.-down social struggle, but more horizontal differences between me and you, between different social groups: the problem of tolerance; the problem of tolerance of other races, religious minorities, and so on. So then the basic problem becomes that of tolerating differences. I am not saying this is bad, of course we should fight for this, but I don’t think that this horizon—within which the ultimate ethical value is then that of tolerating difference—is the fundamental place for question. My problem with liberalism is in principle. This move of the new Left, or new radicals, towards a problem of identity politics (minority politics, gay rights, etc.) lacks a certain more radical insight into the basically antagonistic character of society. This radical questioning has simply disappeared.

For example, take my friend Judith Butler. Of course from time to time, she pays lip service to some kind of anticapitalism, but it’s totally abstract, what it’s basically saying is just how lesbians and other oppressed sexual minorities should perceive their situation not as the assertion of some kind of substantial sexual identity, but as constructing an identity which is contingent, which means that also the so-called straight normal sexuality is contingent, and everybody is constructed in a contingent way, and so on, and in this way, nobody should be excluded. There is no big line between normality identity and multiple roles. The problem I see here is that there is nothing inherently anticapitalist in this logic.

But even worse is that what this kind of politically correct struggling for tolerance and so on advocates is basically not only not in conflict with the modern tendencies of global capitalism, but it fits perfectly. What I think is that today’s capitalism thrives on differences. I mean even naïve positivist psychologists propose to describe today’s subjectivity in terms like multiple subject, fixed-identity subject, a subject who constantly reinvents itself, and so on. So my big problem with this is the painting of the enemy as some kind of self-identified stable substantial patriarch to which these multiple identities and constant reinventing should be opposed. I think that this is a false problem; I am not impressed by this problem. I think that this is a certain logic, totally within the framework of today’s capitalism, where again, capitalism, in order to reproduce itself, to function in today’s condition of consumption society, the crazy dynamics of the market, no longer needs or can function with the traditional fixed patriarchal subject. It needs a subject constantly reinventing himself.

III: ORGANIC FOOD, NEW-AGE
SPIRITUALITY, AND NEW CARS

BLVR: OK, so you think that these antiglobalist movements aren’t asking the right questions and this can be really dangerous. I can see what you’re saying. This reminds me of the example that you gave in On Belief about the health-food market. How purchasing organic food, though seemingly good in intention, can really be a bad thing because of how it is appropriated. Can you explain what you meant by that?

SŽ: More and more crucial today are specialized markets, and in this sense, I think that it’s even more interesting to see how trends which were originally meant to be subversive or critical can be perfectly reappropriated and sold for consumption. Ecological food, organic food, green products, and so on—this is one of the key niche markets today. Let’s take a typical guy who buys organic food: he doesn’t really buy it in order to be healthy; he buys it to regain a kind of solidarity as the one who really cares about nature. He buys a certain ideological stance. It’s the same way as if you have stonewashed jeans, you don’t really buy it for the jeans, but you buy it to project a certain image of your social identity. So again, you are not buying a product, you are buying a certain social status, ideology, and so on.

BLVR: Does this also include your model of “Western Buddhism” as new-age philosophy being a product that can be purchased in capitalism (true Buddhism not being able to exist outside of the East)?

SŽ: Yes, you know why? Because this basic Buddhist insight that there is no permanent self, permanent subject, just events and so on, in an ironic way perfectly mirrors this idea that products are not essential, essential is this freedom of how you consume products and the idea that the market should no longer focus on the product. It is no longer: this car has this quality blah blah blah. No, it’s what you will do with the car. They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?

BLVR: OK, so ironically, when Westerners buy into a Buddhist mentality, then they set themselves up to be perfect consumers in contemporary capitalism. It is kind of sad and funny at the same time. While looking for spirituality or God, they become ideal consumers to marketing executives. Sounds like science fiction.

IV: THE DANGERS OF EASTERN
SPIRITUALITY IN THE WEST AND
THE REVOLUTION OF ST. PAUL’S
CHRISTIANITY, ALL THROUGH
THE EYES OF AN ATHEIST.

BLVR: Do you believe in God?

SŽ: No, I am a complete atheist.

BLVR: Your book The Puppet and the Dwarf deals with St. Paul. In fact, it celebrates St. Paul’s Christianity in contrast to other forms of spirituality, i.e. gnosticism, new-age spiritualities, etc. So why would an atheist defend Christianity?

SŽ: Today, spirituality is fashionable. Either some pagan spirituality of tolerance, feminine principle, holistic approach against phallocentric Western imperialist logic or, within the Western tradition, we have a certain kind of rehabilitation of Judaism, respect for otherness, and so on. Or you are allowed to do Christianity, but you must do a couple of things which are permitted. One is to be for these repressed traditions, the early Gnostic gospels or some mystical sects where a different nonhegemonic/patriarchal line was discernible. Or you return to the original Christ, which is against St. Paul. The idea is that St. Paul was really bad, he changed Christianity into this patriarchal state, but Jesus, himself, was something different.

What I like is to see the emancipatory potential in institutionalized Christianity. Of course, I don’t mean state religion, but I mean the moment of St. Paul. I find a couple of things in it. The idea of the Gospel, or good news, was a totally different logic of emancipation, of justice, of freedom. For example, within a pagan attitude, injustice means a disturbance of the natural order. In ancient Hinduism, or even with Plato, justice was defined in what today we would call almost fascistic terms, each in his or her place in a just order. Man is the benevolent father of the family, women do their job taking care of the family, worker does his work and so on. Each at his post; then injustice means this hubris when one of the elements wants to be born, i.e. instead of in a paternal way, taking care of his population, the king just thinks about his power and how to exploit it. And then in a violent way, balance should be reestablished, or to put it in more abstract cosmological terms, you have cosmic principles like yin and yang. Again, it is the imbalance that needs to establish organic unities. Connected with this is the idea of justice as paying the price as the preexisting established order is balanced.

But the message that the Gospel sends is precisely the radical abandonment of this idea of some kind of natural balance; the idea of Gospels and the part of sins is that freedom is zero. We begin from the zero point, which is at least originally the point of radical equality. Look at what St. Paul is writing and the metaphors he used. It is messianic, the end of time, differences are suspended. It’s a totally different world whose formal structure is that of radical revolution. Even in ancient Greece, you don’t find that—this idea that the world can be turned on its head, that we are not irreducibly bound by the chains of our past. The past can be erased; we can start from the zero point and establish radical justice, so this logic is basically the logic of emancipation. Which is again why I find any flirting with so-called new-age spiritualities extremely dangerous. It is good to know the other side of the story, at least, when you speak about Buddhism and all of these spiritualities. I am sorry, but Nazis did it all. For Hitler, the Bhagavad Gita was a sacred book; he carried it in his pocket all the time. In Nazi Germany there were three institutes for Tibetan studies and five for the study of different sects of Buddhism.

BLVR: That is a really interesting point. I’m not religious at all, but when it comes to religions, I’ve always really distrusted new-age spiritualities.

SŽ: I agree. So let’s at least be clear of where in the West this fascination with Eastern spirituality originated. Of course when I advocate Christian legacy, I make it very clear that this legacy today is not alive in the Catholic or any Christian Church. Here I am kind of a vulgar Stalinist; churches should either be destroyed or turned into cultural homes or museums for religious horrors [laughs]. No no no, it’s not that, but nonetheless, a certain logic of radical emancipation exploded there. And all original emancipatory movements stopped there. This should be admitted. So the point is not to return to the Church, to rehabilitate Christianity, but to keep this certain revolutionary logic alive. I mean this is the good news that the Gospel means: you can do it, take the risk.

V: IDENTIFICATION WITH FICTIONAL
MOVIES, WITH MURDERS

BLVR: So then is your problem with the rest of Christianity the ideology of institutionalized religion?

SŽ: This is not ideology. Ideology for me is a very specific term. Ideology, in a classical Marxist way, has nothing to do with what we usually take as an ideological project. The project of radically changing social orders, this is not, per se, ideology. The most conformist, modest empirical attitude can be ideology. Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power relations and blah blah blah. I claim that the minimum necessary structuring ingredient of every ideology is to distance itself from another ideology, to denounce its other as ideology. Every ideology does this. Which is why, the worst ideology today is post-ideology, where they claim we are entering a new pragmatic era, negotiations, plural interests, no longer time for big ideological projects.

BLVR: So even post-ideology is ideological?

SŽ: For me, ideology is defined only by how the coordinates of your meaningful experience of the world, and your place within society, relate to the basic tensions and antagonisms of social orders. Which is why for me no attitude is a priori ideological. You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological. You can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way, not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data and nonetheless your point is ideological.

For example, I would like to use the wonderful model of Lacan. Let’s say that you are married and you are pathologically jealous, thinking that your wife is sleeping around with other men. And let’s say that you are totally right, she is cheating. Lacan says that your jealousy is still pathological. Even if everything is true it is pathological, because what makes it pathological is not the fact that is it true or not true, but why you invest so much in it—what needs does it fulfill? It’s the same with the Jews and the Nazis. It is not a question that they attributed false properties to the Jews; the point is why did the Nazis need the figure of the Jew as part of their ideological project? It is clear why: their project was to have capitalism without individualism, without tensions, capitalism which would magically maintain what they thought previous eras shared, a sense of organic community and so on, so in order to have this, you must locate the source of evil not in capitalism as such, but in some foreign intruder, that through its profiteering just introduces imbalance and disturbs the natural cooperation between productive capital and labor.

BLVR: So there is no escaping ideology? We are always participating in it?

SŽ: I would say that this just brings about a certain tendency that was here all the time. Like if I go to a more general phenomenon like reality TV, the lesson of it is much more ambiguous, because the charm of it is a certain hidden reflexivity. It is not that we are voyeurs looking at what people are really doing. The point is that we know that they know that they are being filmed. The true reality TV would be to plant cameras and really shoot people unaware of their being watched.

BLVR: That exists already.

SŽ: I wonder if they would be able to go beyond that level, because it’s basically the same as snuff movies. I claim that the way we identify with fictional movies, with murders, is not that we identify it, no: the awareness that it’s not true is part of our identification. Even when we cry and so on. Because, imagine watching a detective story, and someone is shot. If you were to learn that he was really shot, it would ruin your identification with the story. There was this Polish movie from the mid-sixties, a historical spectacle about a pharaoh that has a scene where they sacrifice a horse. And the way that it is shot, they throw lances at the horse, and you can see bleeding. It’s obvious that they are really killing the horse. And it was a dramatic point, people in Poland protested, people in the West didn’t want to see the movie. So you see how much more refined identification in the movie is.

BLVR: We have a strong identification with fiction.

SŽ: My point is this: the problem is that of acting. I think that there is only one radical conclusion here, with reality soaps, that we are seeing people acting themselves. And the conclusion that I would draw is that it is not so much that it is fake, but that in everyday lives, we act already, in the sense that we have a certain ideal image of ourselves and we act that persona.

VI: NOSTALGIA AND
IRRATIONAL POWER

BLVR: What do you think of the fact that California has an actor for governor?

SŽ: What I would like to avoid here is precisely this cheap conservative cultural criticism that this shows the decadence of our times. As if at some point politicians were substantially better—I don’t believe that. The fact that Bush is president is worse for me, because he is not even a good actor, and probably not much more intelligent. You never know what will happen. Schwarzenegger has advisors around him and they may give him good advice. I never quite agreed with the simple dismissal that there is no substance; when was there substance in politicians? The duty of a politician for me is to be a representative: a politician is not an expert, experts are experts, hired for their expertise and so on. A politician is more of…

BLVR: An actor that mediates?

SŽ: Yes, there is a dimension of identification of a master figure and so on. And for all that, it doesn’t matter if an actor does it. The problem for me is not that Schwarzenegger is governor, but the extent to which even politicians who are not actors are functioning like actors. But even this I am tempted not to simply dismiss as a bad phenomenon. Here I agree with Habermas, who made a very intelligent remark. It’s not so much that times are worse today, but that imperceptibly our standards are higher. For example, we don’t have feminism today because women are exploited only today, but they became much more sensitive to it today. The paradox is the following one, if you look, for example, at the typical genesis of a revolution: the terror never became so bad that the people exploded. No, it was always a kind of spiritual revolution, which raised the standards. And then usually those in power began to lose their nerves and accept these new standards silently. Out of this loss of legitimization, it exploded.

For example, recently I read a wonderful text by Bernard Williams that deals with David Mamet’s Oleanna, the harassment play, that made a nice point. If you look closely, Mamet is a little more refined than people usually think. The point is not that the young student is complaining about harassment, but that what she is complaining about is that she came to him as a student, she wanted guidance from him and so on. And basically, he was too liberal, not giving her any authentic guidance as an authority, and precisely because he renounced his authority, his power which remained as a professor appeared as irrational power. So paradoxically, it is precisely when the professor renounces his standard authority and behaves like we are all the same that, between the lines, he keeps his power (he can grade you and so on). At the moment when he pretends to be tolerant, you experience his power in all of its irrationality.

BLVR: That’s like your example of the employee and the boss. You said that when the boss claims to be buddies with the employee, he is actually exploiting the employee more, in that he is covering up all of his power, though in actuality, it still exists.

SŽ: Yes, these are the problems for me. The fact that something appears as irrational unjustified power, it’s not simply that it’s horrible authority. It is precisely when authority declines and you have the first steps towards a more equal tolerant attitude. So again, my lesson here is kind of a pessimistic one, but not pessimistic in the sense that nothing can be done. Pessimistic in the sense that maybe the first step towards really opening up the space to change something is to admit the extent to which there is no easy way out, nothing can be simply changed. Often, the worst way to become prisoner of a system is to have a dream that things may turn better, there is always the possibility of change. Because it is precisely this secret dream that keeps you enslaved to the system.

At this level, I quite liked a modest movie, The Shawshank Redemption. The guy who doesn’t accept that he is in prison and dreams to get out, when he is let out, he hangs himself. And the guys who accept that they are really there, they are the ones who can really break out. So there are alternatives and in alternatives, a certain sense of false opening, in that it’s not necessarily so bad, maybe luck is around the corner, we can change things; those are the ideal ideological tools to keep you enslaved. The system functions through the idea that it can be changed at any point. So maybe the first step is to see that it can’t be changed, that it’s pretty closed.

VII: LACAN AND
FASHION CATALOGUES

BLVR: I would like to go back to the problem of people acting as personas of themselves. This sounds very Lacanian, in the sense that we do not experience the world directly, but by interpretation. The real is itself, mediated (in this case through acting as a persona). Could you describe for me your basic insight into Lacan’s work and what you think is his idea of philosophy?

SŽ: Lacan was a French psychoanalytic theorist, who despised philosophy officially. For Lacan, the discourse of philosophy is of a complete worldview which fills in all of the gaps and cracks. And Lacan’s idea is that precisely what we learn in psychoanalysis is how cracks and inconsistencies are constitutive of our lives. So officially he was against philosophy, but the paradox is that Lacan was constantly in dialogue with philosophy. In his work, there are even more references to Plato and Hegel than to Freud himself.

BLVR: So even though Lacan didn’t want to define the world concretely, he was a kind of philosopher himself?

SŽ: Obviously, Lacan was playing philosophy against itself. The idea being very simply that in our experience of the reality of the world, we always stumble upon some fundamental crack, incompleteness. What appears as an obstacle, the fact that we cannot ever really know things, is for Lacan itself a positive condition of meaning. There is a kernel of philosophy here, what philosophers call ontological difference; this is this experience of a rupture as a fundamental constituent of our lives. So to cut a long story short, for Lacan (and I try to further develop this idea, based on his insight), to properly grasp what Freud was aiming at with the death drive (the fundamental libidinal stance of the human individual for self-sabotaging; the basic idea of psychoanalysis is the pursuit of unhappiness, people do everything possible not to be happy), is to read it against the background of negativity, a gap as fundamental to human subjectivity, so in other words to philosophize psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis in this way is no longer just a psychiatric science which develops a theory of how we can cure certain diseases; it’s kind of a mental and philosophical theory of the utmost radical dimensions of human beings.

BLVR: So Lacan was reading Freud’s death drive, the desire to self-destruct, as a good thing, philosophically speaking. Incompleteness and cracks, themselves being the place where difference is created.

SŽ: Exactly.

BLVR: You wrote some Lacanian-style quotations for last fall’s Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. How did that come about?

SŽ: Oh yes, I was helping someone who helped me once. It was easy, he sent me a series of provocative images, and I just wrote silly Lacanian statements about them. My critics have attacked me, saying how can you conscientiously accept money from such a company? I said, with less guilt than accepting money from the American university system.

Congress is Signing its own Arrest Warrants

How Congress is Signing its own Arrest Warrants in the NDAA Citizen Arrest Bill
Naomi Wolf

http://naomiwolf.org/2011/12/how-congress-is-signing-its-own-arrest-warrants-in-the-ndaa-citizen-arrest-bill/

I never thought I would have to write this: but—incredibly—Congress has now passed the National Defense Appropriations Act, with Amendment 1031, which allows for the military detention of American citizens. The amendment is so loosely worded that any American citizen could be held without due process. The language of this bill can be read to assure Americans that they can challenge their detention — but most people do not realize what this means: at Guantanamo and in other military prisons, one’s lawyer’s calls are monitored, witnesses for one’s defense are not allowed to testify, and one can be forced into nudity and isolation. Incredibly, ninety-three Senators voted to support this bill and now most of Congress: a roster of names that will live in infamy in the history of our nation, and never be expunged from the dark column of the history books.

They may have supported this bill because—although it’s hard to believe—they think the military will only arrest active members of Al Qaida; or maybe, less naively, they believe that ‘at most’, low-level dissenting figures, activists, or troublesome protesters might be subjected to military arrest. But they are forgetting something critical: history shows that those who signed this bill will soon be subject to arrest themselves.

Our leaders appear to be supporting this bill thinking that they will always be what they are now, in the fading light of a once-great democracy — those civilian leaders who safely and securely sit in freedom and DIRECT the military. In inhabiting this bubble, which their own actions are about to destroy, they are cocooned by an arrogance of power, placing their own security in jeopardy by their own hands, and ignoring history and its inevitable laws. The moment this bill becomes law, though Congress is accustomed, in a weak democracy, to being the ones who direct and control the military, the power roles will reverse: Congress will no longer be directing and in charge of the military: rather, the military will be directing and in charge of individual Congressional leaders, as well as in charge of everyone else — as any Parliamentarian in any society who handed this power over to the military can attest.

Perhaps Congress assumes that it will always only be ‘they’ who are targeted for arrest and military detention: but sadly, Parliamentary leaders are the first to face pressure, threats, arrest and even violence when the military obtains to power to make civilian arrests and hold civilians in military facilities without due process. There is no exception to this rule. Just as I traveled the country four years ago warning against the introduction of torture and secret prisons – and confidently offering a hundred thousand dollar reward to anyone who could name a nation that allowed torture of the ‘other’ that did not eventually turn this abuse on its own citizens — (confident because I knew there was no such place) — so today I warn that one cannot name a nation that gave the military the power to make civilian arrests and hold citizens in military detention, that did not almost at once turn that power almost against members of that nation’s own political ruling class. This makes sense — the obverse sense of a democracy, in which power protects you; political power endangers you in a militarized police state: the more powerful a political leader is, the more can be gained in a militarized police state by pressuring, threatening or even arresting him or her.

Mussolini, who created the modern template for fascism, was a duly elected official when he started to direct paramilitary forces against Italian citizens: yes, he sent the Blackshirts to beat up journalists, editors, and union leaders; but where did these militarized groups appear most dramatically and terrifyingly, snapping at last the fragile hold of Italian democracy? In the halls of the Italian Parliament. Whom did they physically attack and intimidate? Mussolini’s former colleagues in Parliament — as they sat, just as our Congress is doing, peacefully deliberating and debating the laws. Whom did Hitler’s Brownshirts arrest in the first wave of mass arrests in 1933? Yes, journalists, union leaders and editors; but they also targeted local and regional political leaders and dragged them off to secret prisons and to torture that the rest of society had turned a blind eye to when it had been directed at the ‘other.’ Who was most at risk from assassination or arrest and torture, after show trials, in Stalin’s Russia? Yes, journalists, editors and dissidents: but also physically endangered, and often arrested by militarized police and tortured or worse, were senior members of the Politburo who had fallen out of favor.

Is this intimidation and arrest by the military a vestige of the past? Hardly. We forget in America that all over the world there are militarized societies in which shells of democracy are propped up — in which Parliament meets regularly and elections are held, but the generals are really in charge, just as the Egyptian military is proposing with upcoming elections and the Constitution itself. That is exactly what will take place if Congress gives the power of arrest and detention to the military: and in those societies if a given political leader does not please the generals, he or she is in physical danger or subjected to military arrest. Whom did John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, say he was directed to intimidate and threaten when he worked as a ‘jackal’, putting pressure on the leadership in authoritarian countries? Latin American parliamentarians who were in the position to decide the laws that affected the well-being of his corporate clients. Who is under house arrest by the military in Myanmar? The political leader of the opposition to the military junta. Malalai Joya is an Afghani parliamentarian who has run afoul of the military and has to sleep in a different venue every night — for her own safety. An on, and on, in police states — that is, countries with military detention of civilians — that America is about to join.

US Congresspeople and Senators may think that their power protects them from the treacherous wording of Amendments 1031 and 1032: but their arrogance is leading them to a blindness that is suicidal. The moment they sign this NDAA into law, history shows that they themselves and their staff are the most physically endangered by it. They will immediately become, not the masters of the great might of the United States military, but its subjects and even, if history is any guide — and every single outcome of ramping up police state powers, unfortunately, that I have warned for years that history points to, has come to pass — sadly but inevitably, its very first targets.
[...]

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‘Reflections on Islamic Art’: A new way to talk about Islam, and art

M. Lynx Qualey
Mon, 02/01/2012 - 10:26

http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/579516

“Reflections on Islamic Art,” edited by Ahdaf Soueif, appears at a time when Islamic art is surging back into fashion.

Soueif’s collection, published in November 2011, pairs art from Doha’s monumental Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) with creative writing from twenty-seven internationally acclaimed authors.

The MIA is a recent contribution to the world of Islamic art, having opened its doors in 2008. But it is not the newest addition: In November 2011, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a new permanent installation, the awkwardly but inclusively titled, “Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia.”

To coincide with its re-vamped collection of Islamic art, the Met also issued a new book of images and essays: “Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

The two publications — “Masterpieces” and “Reflections” — come at roughly the same time, both inspired by work in major museums. But the two projects are markedly different. “Masterpieces” is a coffee-table book, with beautiful images and “informative essays” about the history of Islamic art. Critic Maymanah Farhat, who reviewed the Met’s new installation for Jadaliyya, writes that the installation itself uses the old language of Orientalism, taking “great care to describe the ‘lavish,’ ‘sumptuous,’ and ‘superb’ qualities of these objects.”

The project of “Reflections,” on the other hand, is to shake off this language. The collection won’t give readers a crash course in Islamic art history. But it does offer poems, stories and essays that re-invigorate our understanding of Islamic art, Islam and art.

In her introduction, Soueif explains the idea behind “Reflections” through the email she sent to potential contributors: “‘The Museum,’ I wrote, ‘lends itself particularly well to the idea of this book — that there will be one piece that speaks to you, or a group of pieces that sets of a train of thought/feeling — and that out of this will come a response in words or images…Does this appeal?’”

For the project, Soueif chose a diverse range of excellent writers and thinkers, including art historian Oliver Watson, mathematician Marcus de Sautoy, scientist Jameel al-Khalili, filmmaker Sherin Neshat, philosopher Slavoj Zizek and Egyptian novelists Youssef Rakha and Radwa Ashour.

Each was allowed the freedom to engage with the museum in a way meaningful to them. Some had particular things they were looking for: Youssef Rakha wanted to see his beloved Sultan’s Seal, which is reflected in his latest novel of the same name; Radwa Ashour was looking for a penbox from Granada. Others found new-old things: Lebanese novelist Jabbour al-Douaihy discovered a portrait of the Saint Jerome that set off a series of childhood memories.

The collection ranges widely. But throughout, authors return to the idea of re-inventing the narratives of art and Islamic empire. Some authors, like Pankaj Mishra and Tash Aw, take a new look at Islam’s successes. Mishra comments on Islam’s “astonishing flexibility, its ability to adapt to new conditions” and the Malaysian Aw remarks on Islam’s multiculturalism: “No one told us that we were, in fact, part of a grand narrative of inclusiveness.”

Philosopher Slavoj Zizek goes farther still, re-writing a narrative of Islam as the “third way.” He writes: “Insofar as we tend to oppose East and West as fate and freedom, Islam stands for a third position which undermines this binary opposition — neither subordination to blind fate nor freedom to do what one wants, both of which presuppose and abstract external opposition between the two terms, but a deeper freedom: to alter or to choose our fate.”

Zizek also tries to re-invigorate our idea of art, reminding readers that these museum pieces were once part of daily life. Poet James Fenton, in his essay “A
Great Carpet Fragment and a Great Carpet,” also addresses the relationship between life and art, noting that the proper way to view a great carpet is to stand on it.

Not all the essays are equally good. Palestinian writer Suad Amiry’s is a surprising disappointment. But most of the authors took their charge seriously, and were inspired not just to write beautiful creative work, but to shake off old ways of talking about Islam and art and to invent new ones.

As part of his essay, Egyptian poet and novelist Youssef Rakha dreams a conversation with Abdulhamit II in which the two share a handshake and a cigarette. Rakha examines the shorthand with which contemporary Islam has been identified — “beard, burqa, and bomb” — and goes on to imagine another path. He rejects the Anglo-European path of “integration into the rat-race of smoke-free capitalism” and notes that the way forward might just be through Islamic art.

He writes: “Reason, science, and art are perfectly valid aspects of the Muslim legacy, after all.”

Where Were the Wall Street 'Perp Walks' in 2011?

By Danny Schechter, Al Jazeera
01 January 12
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/201112258031251868.html

As every media critic learns, the worst sin of our press is not its blatant biases, or crimes of commission, but rather the pervasive patterns of omission; what's left out!

Already, with two weeks to go, the Associated Press has crossed the finish line with the top choice of the newspapers it serves. Perhaps in the outdated spirit of Mark Twain's famous dictum that: "There are only two forces that can carry light to all corners of the globe - only two - the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press on earth", their pick for story of the year is the killing of Osama bin Laden.
The AP can't bring itself to label it for what it was - a state-sponsored assassination.

As ever, the mainstream/lamestream - call it what you will - media tails after people in power and promotes/validates their great achievements, even when it was an extra-judicial murder in the dead of night.
Institutional power is their main beat and they beat it to death with every deadline and every headline.

There is no utterance by any political hack - like most of the GOP presidential menagerie - that goes unreported.

On the progressive side of the street, 2011 was 'All Occupy All The Time', with the growing movement against economic inequality getting the most glowing attention.

I am certainly in this camp even if the encampments are mostly gone, with a TV documentary, several radio shows, countless articles and blogs, and now, a book collecting all my output, called, what else, but OCCUPY?

And yet, the story we have yet to see is the one that will ultimately define this era of avarice and insult in a year of media obsession in the US with the Kardashian wedding and break-up, the Michael Jackson trial, and the daily scandal that is there to titillate and drive up ratings.

It has yet to happen and most media outlets are not focussing on why. I am referring to the lack of any real investigation of Wall Street crimes, and the indictments of wrongdoers. I am talking about "perp walks" by guilty Wall Street CEOs on their way to joining Bernie Madoff in some institute of incarceration.

Lack of Investigative Oversight
This is not a call for revenge, but for justice. The reason: the barely exposed chain of criminality that started in some salon of securitisation and then rippled across the world, bringing down countries and economies. It has its origins in Wall Street, where three industries colluded as a cabal to sell fraudulent subprime loans and then transfer fees and foreclosures from poor and middle class Americans to themselves.

Where is the examination of the pillars of our "FIRE" economy - Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. They became the interconnected cogs in a leverage machine to enrich themselves while plundering the rest of us.

So far, this story affecting so many millions has not really crashed through in the 1 per cent media machine with a few exceptions here and there.

If you want to find out about this story of the year and years past, in all of its disgusting detail, you can't just trust major media. You have to read Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, a music magazine, or blogs like Mandelman on Ml-implode.com, Naked Capitalism, Credit Writedowns, ZeroHedge, ProPublica, or Amped Status.com, to cite a few.

TV show host Dylan Ratigan has been a lonely voice on MSNBC while academics like former bank regulator William Black and former Bank economist Michael Hudson speak out frequently on the criminal environment that Wall Street has wrought in alternative outlets.

Journalists like Robert Scheer, Greg Palast and Chris Hedges write regularly on issues that from time to time make it into the columns of New York writers like Paul Krugman, Getrchen Morgensen, Frank Norris and James Stewart. All these opinion pieces rarely lead to follow-ups in the news section.

Overseas, the Telegraph in London has made this a beat as has Max Keiser's programmes on RT and Press TV. There have been some Al Jazeera docs, but business channels like CNBC prefer to focus on greed by colourful bad guys, not the more boring but ultimately criminal practices by banks.

Most of our media is mesmerised by the antics of individuals, not the impact of institutions, Most media outlets are parochial, unwilling to see the economy as globalised force, with the US playing a major role.

'Too Big to Question'
Just as many outlets did not warn us about the coming market meltdown, most are not warning us today about what will happen if the depression we are already sinking into deepens.

The military is making contingency plans as things get worse; reports the Telegraph, "The military planning work has come to light after The Daily Telegraph disclosed last month that British embassies in the eurozone have been told to prepare emergency plans for the demise of the euro and the possible civil disorder that could follow."

This could be one reason for the passage of the new NDAA defence authorisation bill that provides for rounding up dissidents branded as terrorists while suspending legal protections.

Already, a European economic think-tank called LEAP, with a history of credible projections, warns soberly, "Already insolvent (the US) will become ungovernable bringing about, for Americans and those who depend on the United States, violent and destructive economic, financial, monetary, geopolitical and social shocks."

Does anyone really believe that our political leaders in both parties know what to do? Along with the Fed, they have been pumping trillions into the economy to mostly no avail. The promised recovery has yet to show its head.

The trends forecaster, Gerard Calente, is more despairing than most prognosticators, even predicting the possibility of a revolution.

He saves his fiercest words for "media morons" who avoid the stories that matter most, noting:

"And the bigger they got, the more untouchable they became. TV Money Honeys, fast-talking finance finaglers, Nightly News anchors, Sunday Morning Beltway Blowhards, and Talk Show Tough Guys genuflected, scraped, kissed up and bowed down before those magnificent men in their money machines.

When these kings, queens and aristocrats of 21st-century commerce spoke, their ex cathedra judgments went unquestioned. Thus, when they warned that if the "too big to fail" were allowed to fail the world financial system would collapse, their conclusions went unchallenged. No evidence was provided, no proof was needed, and no explanation was tendered. Harvard, Princeton, Yale ... the White Shoe Boyz had spoken. They who invented the "too big to fail" were "too big to question."

What Matters Most Is Covered Least
So here we are once again at year's end debating our picks for the most important news stories of the year, and peering into a future that most of us don't want to see, as a narrow view stifles our politics and vision becomes a word reserved for eyeglass ads.

What matters most is covered least. The financial industry is likely to expose itself and bring itself down before the media does the job it should be doing this by demanding reform consistently.

I may have been dissecting news too long because I think I may have written many of these words before. In the year ahead, I am going to try to keep writing about the resource rich - even as I become more resource "challenged" while talking about what's not in the news but should be.

I will be doing my bit by reviving a Media Channel as Mediachannel1.org with our colleagues at OpEdNews.com and invite readers to remember and revitalise the words of my radio colleague, San Francisco's, "Scoop" Nisker, who ended his newscasts with these words:

"If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own."

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter blogs for Newsdissector.com. His latest book is Occupy: Dissecting Occupy Wall Street. For information and to share your comments, write: dissector@mediachannel.org

Keynes Was Right (says Krugman)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/keynes-was-right.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

By PAUL KRUGMAN

“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” So declared John Maynard Keynes in 1937, even as F.D.R. was about to prove him right by trying to balance the budget too soon, sending the United States economy — which had been steadily recovering up to that point — into a severe recession. Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy further; austerity should wait until a strong recovery is well under way.

Unfortunately, in late 2010 and early 2011, politicians and policy makers in much of the Western world believed that they knew better, that we should focus on deficits, not jobs, even though our economies had barely begun to recover from the slump that followed the financial crisis. And by acting on that anti-Keynesian belief, they ended up proving Keynes right all over again.

In declaring Keynesian economics vindicated I am, of course, at odds with conventional wisdom. In Washington, in particular, the failure of the Obama stimulus package to produce an employment boom is generally seen as having proved that government spending can’t create jobs. But those of us who did the math realized, right from the beginning, that the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (more than a third of which, by the way, took the relatively ineffective form of tax cuts) was much too small given the depth of the slump. And we also predicted the resulting political backlash.

So the real test of Keynesian economics hasn’t come from the half-hearted efforts of the U.S. federal government to boost the economy, which were largely offset by cuts at the state and local levels. It has, instead, come from European nations like Greece and Ireland that had to impose savage fiscal austerity as a condition for receiving emergency loans — and have suffered Depression-level economic slumps, with real G.D.P. in both countries down by double digits.
This wasn’t supposed to happen, according to the ideology that dominates much of our political discourse. In March 2011, the Republican staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee released a report titled “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy.” It ridiculed concerns that cutting spending in a slump would worsen that slump, arguing that spending cuts would improve consumer and business confidence, and that this might well lead to faster, not slower, growth.

They should have known better even at the time: the alleged historical examples of “expansionary austerity” they used to make their case had already been thoroughly debunked. And there was also the embarrassing fact that many on the right had prematurely declared Ireland a success story, demonstrating the virtues of spending cuts, in mid-2010, only to see the Irish slump deepen and whatever confidence investors might have felt evaporate.

Amazingly, by the way, it happened all over again this year. There were widespread proclamations that Ireland had turned the corner, proving that austerity works — and then the numbers came in, and they were as dismal as before.

Yet the insistence on immediate spending cuts continued to dominate the political landscape, with malign effects on the U.S. economy. True, there weren’t major new austerity measures at the federal level, but there was a lot of “passive” austerity as the Obama stimulus faded out and cash-strapped state and local governments continued to cut.

Now, you could argue that Greece and Ireland had no choice about imposing austerity, or, at any rate, no choices other than defaulting on their debts and leaving the euro. But another lesson of 2011 was that America did and does have a choice; Washington may be obsessed with the deficit, but financial markets are, if anything, signaling that we should borrow more.

Again, this wasn’t supposed to happen. We entered 2011 amid dire warnings about a Greek-style debt crisis that would happen as soon as the Federal Reserve stopped buying bonds, or the rating agencies ended our triple-A status, or the superdupercommittee failed to reach a deal, or something. But the Fed ended its bond-purchase program in June; Standard & Poor’s downgraded America in August; the supercommittee deadlocked in November; and U.S. borrowing costs just kept falling. In fact, at this point, inflation-protected U.S. bonds pay negative interest: investors are willing to pay America to hold their money.

The bottom line is that 2011 was a year in which our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren’t actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem — a depressed economy and mass unemployment — worse.
The good news, such as it is, is that President Obama has finally gone back to fighting against premature austerity — and he seems to be winning the political battle. And one of these years we might actually end up taking Keynes’s advice, which is every bit as valid now as it was 75 years ago.

The climate of history: Four theses

Dipesh Chakrabarty

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-10-30-chakrabarty-en.html#

While freedom has been the most important motif of accounts of human history since the Enlightenment, there has never been an awareness of the geological agency human beings were gaining through processes linked to their acquisition of freedom. Whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions that work like boundary parameters of human existence.

The current planetary crisis of climate change or global warming elicits a variety of responses in individuals, groups, and governments, ranging from denial, disconnect, and indifference to a spirit of engagement and activism of varying kinds and degrees. These responses saturate our sense of the now. Alan Weisman's best-selling book The World without Us suggests a thought experiment as a way of experiencing our present: "Suppose that the worst has happened. Human extinction is a fait accompli. [...] Picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. [...] Might we have left some faint, enduring mark on the universe? [...] Is it possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?"[1] I am drawn to Weisman's experiment as it tellingly demonstrates how the current crisis can precipitate a sense of the present that disconnects the future from the past by putting such a future beyond the grasp of historical sensibility. The discipline of history exists on the assumption that our past, present, and future are connected by a certain continuity of human experience. We normally envisage the future with the help of the same faculty that allows us to picture the past. Weisman's thought experiment illustrates the historicist paradox that inhabits contemporary moods of anxiety and concern about the finitude of humanity. To go along with Weisman's experiment, we have to insert ourselves into a future "without us" in order to be able to visualize it. Thus, our usual historical practices for visualizing times, past and future, times inaccessible to us personally – the exercise of historical understanding – are thrown into a deep contradiction and confusion. Weisman's experiment indicates how such confusion follows from our contemporary sense of the present insofar as that present gives rise to concerns about our future. Our historical sense of the present, in Weisman's version, has thus become deeply destructive of our general sense of history.

Climate of change?
Social agreement about the necessity of radical ecological change may be unprecedented, yet rhetoric and reality go their separate ways. Are multilateral climate deals inherently ineffective? Is the cap-and-trade approach being pursued at the expense of fairer alternatives? Is the declaration of commitment to sustainability an exercise in societal self-delusion? A Eurozine focal point debates the politics of global warming.

I will return to Weisman's experiment in the last part of this essay. There is much in the debate on climate change that should be of interest to those involved in contemporary discussions about history. For as the idea gains ground that the grave environmental risks of global warming have to do with excessive accumulation in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases produced mainly through the burning of fossil fuel and the industrialized use of animal stock by human beings, certain scientific propositions have come into circulation in the public domain that have profound, even transformative, implications for how we think about human history or about what the historian C. A. Bayly recently called "the birth of the modern world".[2] Indeed, what scientists have said about climate change challenges not only the ideas about the human that usually sustain the discipline of history but also the analytic strategies that postcolonial and post-imperial historians have deployed in the last two decades in response to the post-war scenario of decolonization and globalization.

In what follows, I present some responses to the contemporary crisis from a historian's point of view. However, a word about my own relationship to the literature on climate change – and indeed to the crisis itself – may be in order. I am a practicing historian with a strong interest in the nature of history as a form of knowledge, and my relationship to the science of global warming is derived, at some remove, from what scientists and other informed writers have written for the education of the general public. Scientific studies of global warming are often said to have originated with the discoveries of the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in the 1890s, but self-conscious discussions of global warming in the public realm began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the same period in which social scientists and humanists began to discuss globalization.[3] However, these discussions have so far run parallel to each other. While globalization, once recognized, was of immediate interest to humanists and social scientists, global warming, in spite of a good number of books published in the 1990s, did not become a public concern until the 2000s. The reasons are not far to seek. As early as 1988 James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, told a Senate committee about global warming and later remarked to a group of reporters on the same day, "It's time to stop waffling [...] and say that the greenhouse effect is here and is affecting our climate."[4] But governments, beholden to special interests and wary of political costs, would not listen. George H. W. Bush, then the president of the United States, famously quipped that he was going to fight the greenhouse effect with the "White House effect".[5] The situation changed in the 2000s when the warnings became dire, and the signs of the crisis – such as the drought in Australia, frequent cyclones and brush fires, crop failures in many parts of the world, the melting of Himalayan and other mountain glaciers and of the polar ice caps, and the increasing acidity of the seas and the damage to the food chain – became politically and economically inescapable. Added to this were growing concerns, voiced by many, about the rapid destruction of other species and about the global footprint of a human population poised to pass the nine billion mark by 2050.[6]

As the crisis gathered momentum in the last few years, I realized that all my readings in theories of globalization, Marxist analysis of capital, subaltern studies, and postcolonial criticism over the last twenty-five years, while enormously useful in studying globalization, had not really prepared me for making sense of this planetary conjuncture within which humanity finds itself today. The change of mood in globalization analysis may be seen by comparing Giovanni Arrighi's masterful history of world capitalism, The Long Twentieth Century (1994), with his more recent Adam Smith in Beijing (2007), which, among other things, seeks to understand the implications of the economic rise of China. The first book, a long meditation on the chaos internal to capitalist economies, ends with the thought of capitalism burning up humanity "in the horrors (or glories) of the escalating violence that has accompanied the liquidation of the Cold War world order". It is clear that the heat that burns the world in Arrighi's narrative comes from the engine of capitalism and not from global warming. By the time Arrighi comes to write Adam Smith in Beijing, however, he is much more concerned with the question of ecological limits to capitalism. That theme provides the concluding note of the book, suggesting the distance that a critic such as Arrighi has travelled in the thirteen years that separate the publication of the two books.[7] If, indeed, globalization and global warming are born of overlapping processes, the question is, How do we bring them together in our understanding of the world?

Not being a scientist myself, I also make a fundamental assumption about the science of climate change. I assume the science to be right in its broad outlines. I thus assume that the views expressed particularly in the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations, in the Stern Review, and in the many books that have been published recently by scientists and scholars seeking to explain the science of global warming, leave me with enough rational ground for accepting, unless the scientific consensus shifts in a major way, that there is a large measure of truth to anthropogenic theories of climate change.[8] For this position, I depend on observations such as the following one reported by Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at the University of California, San Diego. Upon examining the abstracts of 928 papers on global warming published in specialized peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, Oreskes found that not a single one sought to refute the "consensus" among scientists "over the reality of human-induced climate change". There is disagreement over the amount and direction of change. But "virtually all professional climate scientists," writes Oreskes, "agree on the reality of human-induced climate change, but debate continues on tempo and mode".[9] Indeed, in what I have read so far, I have not seen any reason yet for remaining a global-warming sceptic.

The scientific consensus around the proposition that the present crisis of climate change is man-made forms the basis of what I have to say here. In the interest of clarity and focus, I present my propositions in the form of four theses. The last three theses follow from the first one. I begin with the proposition that anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history and end by returning to the question I opened with: How does the crisis of climate change appeal to our sense of human universals while challenging at the same time our capacity for historical understanding?

Thesis 1: Anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history
Philosophers and students of history have often displayed a conscious tendency to separate human history – or the story of human affairs, as R. G. Collingwood put it – from natural history, sometimes proceeding even to deny that nature could ever have history quite in the same way humans have it. This practice itself has a long and rich past of which, for reasons of space and personal limitations, I can only provide a very provisional, thumbnail, and somewhat arbitrary sketch.[10]

We could begin with the old Viconian-Hobbesian idea that we, humans, could have proper knowledge of only civil and political institutions because we made them, while nature remains God's work and ultimately inscrutable to man. "The true is identical with the created: verum ipsum factum" is how Croce summarized Vico's famous dictum.[11] Vico scholars have sometimes protested that Vico did not make such a drastic separation between the natural and the human sciences as Croce and others read into his writings, but even they admit that such a reading is widespread.[12]

This Viconian understanding was to become a part of the historian's common sense in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It made its way into Marx's famous utterance that "men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please" and into the title of the Marxist archaeologist V. Gordon Childe's well-known book, Man Makes Himself.[13] Croce seems to have been a major source of this distinction in the second half of the twentieth century through his influence on "the lonely Oxford historicist" Collingwood who, in turn, deeply influenced E. H. Carr's 1961 book, What Is History?, which is still perhaps one of the best-selling books on the historian's craft.[14] Croce's thoughts, one could say, unbeknown to his legatees and with unforeseeable modifications, have triumphed in our understanding of history in the postcolonial age. Behind Croce and his adaptations of Hegel and hidden in Croce's creative misreading of his predecessors stands the more distant and foundational figure of Vico.[15] The connections here, again, are many and complex. Suffice it to say for now that Croce's 1911 book, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico, dedicated, significantly, to Wilhelm Windelband, was translated into English in 1913 by none other than Collingwood, who was an admirer, if not a follower, of the Italian master.

However, Collingwood's own argument for separating natural history from human ones developed its own inflections, while running, one might say, still on broadly Viconian lines as interpreted by Croce. Nature, Collingwood remarked, has no "inside". "In the case of nature, this distinction between the outside and the inside of an event does not arise. The events of nature are mere events, not the acts of agents whose thought the scientist endeavours to trace." Hence, "all history properly so called is the history of human affairs". The historian's job is "to think himself into [an] action, to discern the thought of its agent". A distinction, therefore, has "to be made between historical and non-historical human actions. [...] So far as man's conduct is determined by what may be called his animal nature, his impulses and appetites, it is non-historical; the process of those activities is a natural process." Thus, says Collingwood, "the historian is not interested in the fact that men eat and sleep and make love and thus satisfy their natural appetites; but he is interested in the social customs which they create by their thought as a framework within which these appetites find satisfaction in ways sanctioned by convention and morality." Only the history of the social construction of the body, not the history of the body as such, can be studied. By splitting the human into the natural and the social or cultural, Collingwood saw no need to bring the two together.[16]

In discussing Croce's 1893 essay "History Subsumed under the Concept of Art," Collingwood wrote, "Croce, by denying [the German idea] that history was a science at all, cut himself at one blow loose from naturalism, and set his face towards an idea of history as something radically different from nature."[17] David Roberts gives a fuller account of the more mature position in Croce. Croce drew on the writings of Ernst Mach and Henri Poincaré to argue that "the concepts of the natural sciences are human constructs elaborated for human purposes". "When we peer into nature," he said, "we find only ourselves". We do not "understand ourselves best as part of the natural world". So, as Roberts puts it, "Croce proclaimed that there is no world but the human world, then took over the central doctrine of Vico that we can know the human world because we have made it." For Croce, then, all material objects were subsumed into human thought. No rocks, for example, existed in themselves. Croce's idealism, Roberts explains, "does not mean that rocks, for example, 'don't exist' without human beings to think them. Apart from human concern and language, they neither exist nor do not exist, since 'exist' is a human concept that has meaning only within a context of human concerns and purposes."[18] Both Croce and Collingwood would thus enfold human history and nature, to the extent that the latter could be said to have history, into purposive human action. What exists beyond that does not "exist" because it does not exist for humans in any meaningful sense.

In the twentieth century, however, other arguments, more sociological or materialist, have existed alongside the Viconian one. They too have continued to justify the separation of human from natural history. One influential though perhaps infamous example would be the booklet on the Marxist philosophy of history that Stalin published in 1938, Dialectical and Historical Materialism. This is how Stalin put the problem:

Geographical environment is unquestionably one of the constant and indispensable conditions of development of society and, of course, [...] [it] accelerates or retards its development. But its influence is not the determining influence, inasmuch as the changes and development of society proceed at an incomparably faster rate than the changes and development of geographical environment. In the space of 3000 years three different social systems have been successfully superseded in Europe: the primitive communal system, the slave system and the feudal system. [...] Yet during this period geographical conditions in Europe have either not changed at all, or have changed so slightly that geography takes no note of them. And that is quite natural. Changes in geographical environment of any importance require millions of years, whereas a few hundred or a couple of thousand years are enough for even very important changes in the system of human society.[19]

For all its dogmatic and formulaic tone, Stalin's passage captures an assumption perhaps common to historians of the mid-twentieth century: man's environment did change but changed so slowly as to make the history of man's relation to his environment almost timeless and thus not a subject of historiography at all. Even when Fernand Braudel rebelled against the state of the discipline of history as he found it in the late 1930s and proclaimed his rebellion later in 1949 through his great book The Mediterranean, it was clear that he rebelled mainly against historians who treated the environment simply as a silent and passive backdrop to their historical narratives, something dealt with in the introductory chapter but forgotten thereafter, as if, as Braudel put it, "the flowers did not come back every spring, the flocks of sheep migrate every year, or the ships sail on a real sea that changes with the seasons". In composing The Mediterranean, Braudel wanted to write a history in which the seasons – "a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles" – and other recurrences in nature played an active role in moulding human actions.[20] The environment, in that sense, had an agentive presence in Braudel's pages, but the idea that nature was mainly repetitive had a long and ancient history in European thought, as Gadamer showed in his discussion of Johann Gustav Droysen.[21] Braudel's position was no doubt a great advance over the kind of nature-as-a-backdrop argument that Stalin developed. But it shared a fundamental assumption, too, with the stance adopted by Stalin: the history of "man's relationship to the environment" was so slow as to be "almost timeless."[22] In today's climatologists' terms, we could say that Stalin and Braudel and others who thought thus did not have available to them the idea, now widespread in the literature on global warming, that the climate, and hence the overall environment, can sometimes reach a tipping point at which this slow and apparently timeless backdrop for human actions transforms itself with a speed that can only spell disaster for human beings.

If Braudel, to some degree, made a breach in the binary of natural/ human history, one could say that the rise of environmental history in the late twentieth century made the breach wider. It could even be argued that environmental historians have sometimes indeed progressed towards producing what could be called natural histories of man. But there is a very important difference between the understanding of the human being that these histories have been based on and the agency of the human now being proposed by scientists writing on climate change. Simply put, environmental history, where it was not straightforwardly cultural, social, or economic history, looked upon human beings as biological agents. Alfred Crosby, Jr., whose book The Columbian Exchange did much to pioneer the "new" environmental histories in the early 1970s, put the point thus in his original preface: "Man is a biological entity before he is a Roman Catholic or a capitalist or anything else."[23] The recent book by Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, is adventurous in attempting to connect knowledge gained from evolutionary and neurosciences with human histories. Smail's book pursues possible connections between biology and culture – between the history of the human brain and cultural history, in particular – while being always sensitive to the limits of biological reasoning. But it is the history of human biology and not any recent theses about the newly acquired geological agency of humans that concerns Smail.[24]

Scholars writing on the current climate-change crisis are indeed saying something significantly different from what environmental historians have said so far. In unwittingly destroying the artificial but time-honoured distinction between natural and human histories, climate scientists posit that the human being has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she always has been. Humans now wield a geological force. As Oreskes puts it: "To deny that global warming is real is precisely to deny that humans have become geological agents, changing the most basic physical processes of the earth."

For centuries, [she continues,] scientists thought that earth processes were so large and powerful that nothing we could do could change them. This was a basic tenet of geological science: that human chronologies were insignificant compared with the vastness of geological time; that human activities were insignificant compared with the force of geological processes. And once they were. But no more. There are now so many of us cutting down so many trees and burning so many billions of tons of fossil fuels that we have indeed become geological agents. We have changed the chemistry of our atmosphere, causing sea level to rise, ice to melt, and climate to change. There is no reason to think otherwise.[25]

Biological agents, geological agents – two different names with very different consequences. Environmental history, to go by Crosby's masterful survey of the origins and the state of the field in 1995, has much to do with biology and geography but hardly ever imagined human impact on the planet on a geological scale. It was still a vision of man "as a prisoner of climate," as Crosby put it quoting Braudel, and not of man as the maker of it.[26] To call human beings geological agents is to scale up our imagination of the human. Humans are biological agents, both collectively and as individuals. They have always been so. There was no point in human history when humans were not biological agents. But we can become geological agents only historically and collectively, that is, when we have reached numbers and invented technologies that are on a scale large enough to have an impact on the planet itself. To call ourselves geological agents is to attribute to us a force on the same scale as that released at other times when there has been a mass extinction of species. We seem to be currently going through that kind of a period. The current "rate in the loss of species diversity," specialists argue, "is similar in intensity to the event around 65 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs."[27] Our footprint was not always that large. Humans began to acquire this agency only since the Industrial Revolution, but the process really picked up in the second half of the twentieth century. Humans have become geological agents very recently in human history. In that sense, we can say that it is only very recently that the distinction between human and natural histories – much of which had been preserved even in environmental histories that saw the two entities in interaction – has begun to collapse. For it is no longer a question simply of man having an interactive relation with nature. This humans have always had, or at least that is how man has been imagined in a large part of what is generally called the Western tradition.[28] Now it is being claimed that humans are a force of nature in the geological sense. A fundamental assumption of Western (and now universal) political thought has come undone in this crisis.[29]

Thesis 2: The idea of the anthropocene, the new geological epoch when humans exist as a geological force, severely qualifies humanist histories of modernity/globalization

How to combine human cultural and historical diversity with human freedom has formed one of the key underlying questions of human histories written of the period from 1750 to the years of present-day globalization. Diversity, as Gadamer pointed out with reference to Leopold von Ranke, was itself a figure of freedom in the historian's imagination of the historical process.[30] Freedom has, of course, meant different things at different times, ranging from ideas of human and citizens' rights to those of decolonization and self-rule. Freedom, one could say, is a blanket category for diverse imaginations of human autonomy and sovereignty. Looking at the works of Kant, Hegel, or Marx; nineteenth-century ideas of progress and class struggle; the struggle against slavery; the Russian and Chinese revolutions; the resistance to Nazism and Fascism; the decolonization movements of the 1950s and 1960s and the revolutions in Cuba and Vietnam; the evolution and explosion of the rights discourse; the fight for civil rights for African Americans, indigenous peoples, Indian Dalits, and other minorities; down to the kind of arguments that, say, Amartya Sen put forward in his book Development as Freedom, one could say that freedom has been the most important motif of written accounts of human history of these two hundred and fifty years. Of course, as I have already noted, freedom has not always carried the same meaning for everyone. Francis Fukuyama's understanding of freedom would be significantly different from that of Sen. But this semantic capaciousness of the word only speaks to its rhetorical power.

In no discussion of freedom in the period since the Enlightenment was there ever any awareness of the geological agency that human beings were acquiring at the same time as and through processes closely linked to their acquisition of freedom. Philosophers of freedom were mainly, and understandably, concerned with how humans would escape the injustice, oppression, inequality, or even uniformity foisted on them by other humans or human-made systems. Geological time and the chronology of human histories remained unrelated. This distance between the two calendars, as we have seen, is what climate scientists now claim has collapsed. The period I have mentioned, from 1750 to now, is also the time when human beings switched from wood and other renewable fuels to large-scale use of fossil fuel – first coal and then oil and gas. The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive. The period of human history usually associated with what we today think of as the institutions of civilization – the beginnings of agriculture, the founding of cities, the rise of the religions we know, the invention of writing – began about ten thousand years ago, as the planet moved from one geological period, the last ice age or the Pleistocene, to the more recent and warmer Holocene. The Holocene is the period we are supposed to be in; but the possibility of anthropogenic climate change has raised the question of its termination. Now that humans – thanks to our numbers, the burning of fossil fuel, and other related activities – have become a geological agent on the planet, some scientists have proposed that we recognize the beginning of a new geological era, one in which humans act as a main determinant of the environment of the planet. The name they have coined for this new geological age is Anthropocene. The proposal was first made by the Nobelwinning chemist Paul J. Crutzen and his collaborator, a marine science specialist, Eugene F. Stoermer. In a short statement published in 2000, they said, "Considering [...] [the] major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term 'anthropocene' for the current geological epoch."[31] Crutzen elaborated on the proposal in a short piece published in Nature in 2002:

For the past three centuries, the effects of humans on the global environment have escalated. Because of these anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, global climate may depart significantly from natural behaviour for many millennia to come. It seems appropriate to assign the term "Anthropocene" to the present, [...] human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene – the warm period of the past 1012 millennia. The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. This date also happens to coincide with James Watt's design of the steam engine in 1784.[32]
It is, of course, true that Crutzen's saying so does not make the Anthropocene an officially accepted geologic period. As Mike Davis comments, "in geology, as in biology or history, periodization is a complex, controversial art," involving, always, vigorous debates and contestation.[33] The name Holocene for "the post-glacial geological epoch of the past ten to twelve thousand years" ("A," p. 17), for example, gained no immediate acceptance when proposed – apparently by Sir Charles Lyell – in 1833. The International Geological Congress officially adopted the name at their meeting in Bologna after about fifty years in 1885 (see "A," p. 17). The same goes for Anthropocene. Scientists have engaged Crutzen and his colleagues on the question of when exactly the Anthropocene may have begun. But the February 2008 newsletter of the Geological Society of America, GSA Today, opens with a statement signed by the members of the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London accepting Crutzen's definition and dating of the Anthropocene.[34] Adopting a "conservative" approach, they conclude: "Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene – currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change – as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization by international discussion."[35] There is increasing evidence that the term is gradually winning acceptance among social scientists as well.[36]

So, has the period from 1750 to now been one of freedom or that of the Anthropocene? Is the Anthropocene a critique of the narratives of freedom? Is the geological agency of humans the price we pay for the pursuit of freedom? In some ways, yes. As Edward O. Wilson said in his The Future of Life: "Humanity has so far played the role of planetary killer, concerned only with its own short-term survival. We have cut much of the heart out of biodiversity. [...] If Emi, the Sumatran rhino could speak, she might tell us that the twenty-first century is thus far no exception."[37] But the relation between Enlightenment themes of freedom and the collapsing of human and geological chronologies seems more complicated and contradictory than a simple binary would allow. It is true that human beings have tumbled into being a geological agent through our own decisions. The Anthropocene, one might say, has been an unintended consequence of human choices. But it is also clear that for humans any thought of the way out of our current predicament cannot but refer to the idea of deploying reason in global, collective life. As Wilson put it: "We know more about the problem now. [...] We know what to do" (FL, p. 102). Or, to quote Crutzen and Stoermer again:

Mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years, to come. To develop a world-wide accepted strategy leading to sustainability of ecosystems against human-induced stresses will be one of the great future tasks of mankind, requiring intensive research efforts and wise application of knowledge thus acquired. [...] An exciting, but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of the global research and engineering community to guide mankind towards global, sustainable, environmental management. ["A," p. 18]

Logically, then, in the era of the Anthropocene, we need the Enlightenment (that is, reason) even more than in the past. There is one consideration though that qualifies this optimism about the role of reason and that has to do with the most common shape that freedom takes in human societies: politics. Politics has never been based on reason alone. And politics in the age of the masses and in a world already complicated by sharp inequalities between and inside nations is something no one can control. "Sheer demographic momentum," writes Davis, "will increase the world's urban population by 3 billion people over the next 40 years (90 per cent of them in poor cities), and no one – absolutely no one [including, one might say, scholars on the Left] – has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity" ("LIS").

It is not surprising then that the crisis of climate change should produce anxieties precisely around futures that we cannot visualize. Scientists' hope that reason will guide us out of the present predicament is reminiscent of the social opposition between the myth of Science and the actual politics of the sciences that Bruno Latour discusses in his Politics of Nature.[38] Bereft of any sense of politics, Wilson can only articulate his sense of practicality as a philosopher's hope mixed with anxiety: "Perhaps we will act in time" (FL, p. 102). Yet the very science of global warming produces of necessity political imperatives. Tim Flannery's book, for instance, raises the dark prospects of an "Orwellian nightmare" in a chapter entitled "2084: The Carbon Dictatorship?"[39] Mark Maslin concludes his book with some gloomy thoughts: "It is unlikely that global politics will solve global warming. Technofixes are dangerous or cause problems as bad as the ones they are aimed at fixing. [...] [Global warming] requires nations and regions to plan for the next 50 years, something that most societies are unable to do because of the very short-term nature of politics." His recommendation, "we must prepare for the worst and adapt," coupled with Davis's observations about the coming "planet of slums" places the question of human freedom under the cloud of the Anthropocene.[40]

Thesis 3: The geological hypothesis regarding the anthropocene requires us to put global histories of capital in conversation with the species history of humans

Analytic frameworks engaging questions of freedom by way of critiques of capitalist globalization have not, in any way, become obsolete in the age of climate change. If anything, as Davis shows, climate change may well end up accentuating all the inequities of the capitalist world order if the interests of the poor and vulnerable are neglected (see "LIS"). Capitalist globalization exists; so should its critiques. But these critiques do not give us an adequate hold on human history once we accept that the crisis of climate change is here with us and may exist as part of this planet for much longer than capitalism or long after capitalism has undergone many more historic mutations. The problematic of globalization allows us to read climate change only as a crisis of capitalist management. While there is no denying that climate change has profoundly to do with the history of capital, a critique that is only a critique of capital is not sufficient for addressing questions relating to human history once the crisis of climate change has been acknowledged and the Anthropocene has begun to loom on the horizon of our present. The geologic now of the Anthropocene has become entangled with the now of human history.

Scholars who study human beings in relation to the crisis of climate change and other ecological problems emerging on a world scale make a distinction between the recorded history of human beings and their deep history. Recorded history refers, very broadly, to the ten thousand years that have passed since the invention of agriculture but more usually to the last four thousand years or so for which written records exist. Historians of modernity and "early modernity" usually move in the archives of the last four hundred years. The history of humans that goes beyond these years of written records constitutes what other students of human pasts – not professional historians – call deep history. As Wilson, one of the main proponents of this distinction, writes: "Human behaviour is seen as the product not just of recorded history, ten thousand years recent, but of deep history, the combined genetic and cultural changes that created humanity over hundreds of [thousands of] years."[41] It, of course, goes to the credit of Smail that he has attempted to explain to professional historians the intellectual appeal of deep history.[42]

Without such knowledge of the deep history of humanity it would be difficult to arrive at a secular understanding of why climate change constitutes a crisis for humans. Geologists and climate scientists may explain why the current phase of global warming – as distinct from the warming of the planet that has happened before – is anthropogenic in nature, but the ensuing crisis for humans is not understandable unless one works out the consequences of that warming. The consequences make sense only if we think of humans as a form of life and look on human history as part of the history of life on this planet. For, ultimately, what the warming of the planet threatens is not the geological planet itself but the very conditions, both biological and geological, on which the survival of human life as developed in the Holocene period depends.

The word that scholars such as Wilson or Crutzen use to designate life in the human form – and in other living forms – is species. They speak of the human being as a species and find that category useful in thinking about the nature of the current crisis. It is a word that will never occur in any standard history or political-economic analysis of globalization by scholars on the Left, for the analysis of globalization refers, for good reasons, only to the recent and recorded history of humans. Species thinking, on the other hand, is connected to the enterprise of deep history. Further, Wilson and Crutzen actually find such thinking essential to visualizing human well-being. As Wilson writes: "We need this longer view [...] not only to understand our species but more firmly to secure its future" (SN, p. x). The task of placing, historically, the crisis of climate change thus requires us to bring together intellectual formations that are somewhat in tension with each other: the planetary and the global; deep and recorded histories; species thinking and critiques of capital.

In saying this, I work somewhat against the grain of historians' thinking on globalization and world history. In a landmark essay published in 1995 and entitled "World History in a Global Age," Michael Geyer and Charles Bright wrote, "At the end of the twentieth century, we encounter, not a universalizing and single modernity but an integrated world of multiple and multiplying modernities." "As far as world history is concerned," they said, "there is no universalizing spirit. [...] There are, instead, many very specific, very material and pragmatic practices that await critical reflection and historical study." Yet, thanks to global connections forged by trade, empires, and capitalism, "we confront a startling new condition: humanity, which has been the subject of world history for many centuries and civilizations, has now come into the purview of all human beings. This humanity is extremely polarized into rich and poor."[43] This humanity, Geyer and Bright imply in the spirit of the philosophies of difference, is not one. It does not, they write, "form a single homogenous civilization." "Neither is this humanity any longer a mere species or a natural condition. For the first time," they say, with some existentialist flourish, "we as human beings collectively constitute ourselves and, hence, are responsible for ourselves" ("WH," p. 1059). Clearly, the scientists who advocate the idea of the Anthropocene are saying something quite the contrary. They argue that because humans constitute a particular kind of species they can, in the process of dominating other species, acquire the status of a geologic force. Humans, in other words, have become a natural condition, at least today. How do we create a conversation between these two positions?

It is understandable that the biological-sounding talk of species should worry historians. They feel concerned about their finely honed sense of contingency and freedom in human affairs having to cede ground to a more deterministic view of the world. Besides, there are always, as Smail recognizes, dangerous historical examples of the political use of biology.[44] The idea of species, it is feared, in addition, may introduce a powerful degree of essentialism in our understanding of humans. I will return to the question of contingency later in this section, but, on the issue of essentialism, Smail helpfully points out why species cannot be thought of in essentialist terms:

Species, according to Darwin, are not fixed entities with natural essences imbued in them by the Creator. [...] Natural selection does not homogenize the individuals of a species. [...] Given this state of affairs, the search for a normal [...] nature and body type [of any particular species] is futile. And so it goes for the equally futile quest to identify "human nature." Here, as in so many areas, biology and cultural studies are fundamentally congruent.[45]

It is clear that different academic disciplines position their practitioners differently with regard to the question of how to view the human being. All disciplines have to create their objects of study. If medicine or biology reduces the human to a certain specific understanding of him or her, humanist historians often do not realize that the protagonists of their stories – persons – are reductions, too. Absent personhood, there is no human subject of history. That is why Derrida earned the wrath of Foucault by pointing out that any desire to enable or allow madness itself to speak in a history of madness would be "the maddest aspect" of the project.[46] An object of critical importance to humanists of all traditions, personhood is nevertheless no less of a reduction of or an abstraction from the embodied and whole human being than, say, the human skeleton discussed in an anatomy class.

The crisis of climate change calls on academics to rise above their disciplinary prejudices, for it is a crisis of many dimensions. In that context, it is interesting to observe the role that the category of species has begun to play among scholars, including economists, who have already gone further than historians in investigating and explaining the nature of this crisis. The economist Jeffrey Sachs's book, Common Wealth, meant for the educated but lay public, uses the idea of species as central to its argument and devotes a whole chapter to the Anthropocene.[47] In fact, the scholar from whom Sachs solicited a foreword for his book was none other than Edward Wilson. The concept of species plays a quasi-Hegelian role in Wilson's foreword in the same way as the multitude or the masses in Marxist writings. If Marxists of various hues have at different times thought that the good of humanity lay in the prospect of the oppressed or the multitude realizing their own global unity through a process of coming into self-consciousness, Wilson pins his hope on the unity possible through our collective self-recognition as a species: "Humanity has consumed or transformed enough of Earth's irreplaceable resources to be in better shape than ever before. We are smart enough and now, one hopes, well informed enough to achieve self-understanding as a unified species. [...] We will be wise to look on ourselves as a species."[48]

Yet doubts linger about the use of the idea of species in the context of climate change, and it would be good to deal with one that can easily arise among critics on the Left. One could object, for instance, that all the anthropogenic factors contributing to global warming – the burning of fossil fuel, industrialization of animal stock, the clearing of tropical and other forests, and so on – are after all part of a larger story: the unfolding of capitalism in the West and the imperial or quasi-imperial domination by the West of the rest of the world. It is from that recent history of the West that the elite of China, Japan, India, Russia, and Brazil have drawn inspiration in attempting to develop their own trajectories toward superpower politics and global domination through capitalist economic, technological, and military might. If this is broadly true, then does not the talk of species or mankind simply serve to hide the reality of capitalist production and the logic of imperial – formal, informal, or machinic in a Deleuzian sense – domination that it fosters? Why should one include the poor of the world – whose carbon footprint is small anyway – by use of such all inclusive terms as species or mankind when the blame for the current crisis should be squarely laid at the door of the rich nations in the first place and of the richer classes in the poorer ones?

We need to stay with this question a little longer; otherwise the difference between the present historiography of globalization and the historiography demanded by anthropogenic theories of climate change will not be clear to us. Though some scientists would want to date the Anthropocene from the time agriculture was invented, my readings mostly suggest that our falling into the Anthropocene was neither an ancient nor an inevitable happening. Human civilization surely did not begin on condition that, one day in his history, man would have to shift from wood to coal and from coal to petroleum and gas. That there was much historical contingency in the transition from wood to coal as the main source of energy has been demonstrated powerfully by Kenneth Pomeranz in his pathbreaking book The Great Divergence.[49] Coincidences and historical accidents similarly litter the stories of the "discovery" of oil, of the oil tycoons, and of the automobile industry as they do any other histories.[50] Capitalist societies themselves have not remained the same since the beginning of capitalism.[51] Human population, too, has dramatically increased since the Second World War. India alone is now more than three times more populous than at independence in 1947. Clearly, nobody is in a position to claim that there is something inherent to the human species that has pushed us finally into the Anthropocene. We have stumbled into it. The way to it was no doubt through industrial civilization. (I do not make a distinction here between the capitalist and socialist societies we have had so far, for there was never any principled difference in their use of fossil fuel.)

If the industrial way of life was what got us into this crisis, then the question is, Why think in terms of species, surely a category that belongs to a much longer history? Why could not the narrative of capitalism – and hence its critique – be sufficient as a framework for interrogating the history of climate change and understanding its consequences? It seems true that the crisis of climate change has been necessitated by the high-energy consuming models of society that capitalist industrialization has created and promoted, but the current crisis has brought into view certain other conditions for the existence of life in the human form that have no intrinsic connection to the logics of capitalist, nationalist, or socialist identities. They are connected rather to the history of life on this planet, the way different life-forms connect to one another, and the way the mass extinction of one species could spell danger for another. Without such a history of life, the crisis of climate change has no human "meaning." For, as I have said before, it is not a crisis for the inorganic planet in any meaningful sense.

In other words, the industrial way of life has acted much like the rabbit hole in Alice's story; we have slid into a state of things that forces on us a recognition of some of the parametric (that is, boundary) conditions for the existence of institutions central to our idea of modernity and the meanings we derive from them. Let me explain. Take the case of the agricultural revolution, so called, of ten thousand years ago. It was not just an expression of human inventiveness. It was made possible by certain changes in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a certain stability of the climate, and a degree of warming of the planet that followed the end of the Ice Age (the Pleistocene era) – things over which human beings had no control. "There can be little doubt," writes one of the editors of Humans at the End of the Ice Age, "that the basic phenomenon – the waning of the Ice Age – was the result of the Milankovich phenomena: the orbital and tilt relationships between the Earth and the Sun."[52] The temperature of the planet stabilized within a zone that allowed grass to grow. Barley and wheat are among the oldest of such grasses. Without this lucky "long summer" or what one climate scientist has called an "extraordinary" "fluke" of nature in the history of the planet, our industrial-agricultural way of life would not have been possible.[53] In other words, whatever our socioeconomic and technological choices, whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions (such as the temperature zone in which the planet exists) that work like boundary parameters of human existence. These parameters are independent of capitalism or socialism. They have been stable for much longer than the histories of these institutions and have allowed human beings to become the dominant species on earth. Unfortunately, we have now ourselves become a geological agent disturbing these parametric conditions needed for our own existence.

This is not to deny the historical role that the richer and mainly Western nations of the world have played in emitting greenhouse gases. To speak of species thinking is not to resist the politics of "common but differentiated responsibility" that China, India, and other developing countries seem keen to pursue when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.[54] Whether we blame climate change on those who are retrospectively guilty – that is, blame the West for their past performance – or those who are prospectively guilty (China has just surpassed the United States as the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, though not on a per capita basis) is a question that is tied no doubt to the histories of capitalism and modernization.[55] But scientists' discovery of the fact that human beings have in the process become a geological agent points to a shared catastrophe that we have all fallen into. Here is how Crutzen and Stoermer describe that catastrophe:

The expansion of mankind [...] has been astounding. [...] During the past 3 centuries human population increased tenfold to 6000 million, accompanied e.g. by a growth in cattle population to 1400 million (about one cow per average size family). [...] In a few generations mankind is exhausting the fossil fuels that were generated over several hundred million years. The release of SO2 [...] to the atmosphere by coal and oil burning, is at least two times larger than the sum of all natural emissions [...]; more than half of all accessible fresh water is used by mankind; human activity has increased the species extinction rate by thousand to ten thousand fold in the tropical rain forests. [...] Furthermore, mankind releases many toxic substances in the environment. [...] The effects documented include modification of the geochemical cycle in large freshwater systems and occur in systems remote from primary sources. ["A," p. 17]

Explaining this catastrophe calls for a conversation between disciplines and between recorded and deep histories of human beings in the same way that the agricultural revolution of ten thousand years ago could not be explained except through a convergence of three disciplines: geology, archaeology, and history.[56]

Scientists such as Wilson or Crutzen may be politically naive in not recognizing that reason may not be all that guides us in our effective collective choices – in other words, we may collectively end up making some unreasonable choices – but I find it interesting and symptomatic that they speak the language of the Enlightenment. They are not necessarily anti-capitalist scholars, and yet clearly they are not for business-as-usual capitalism either. They see knowledge and reason providing humans not only a way out of this present crisis but a way of keeping us out of harm's way in the future. Wilson, for example, speaks of devising a "wiser use of resources" in a manner that sounds distinctly Kantian (SN, p. 199). But the knowledge in question is the knowledge of humans as a species, a species dependent on other species for its own existence, a part of the general history of life. Changing the climate, increasingly not only the average temperature of the planet but also the acidity and the level of the oceans, and destroying the food chain are actions that cannot be in the interest of our lives. These parametric conditions hold irrespective of our political choices. It is therefore impossible to understand global warming as a crisis without engaging the propositions put forward by these scientists. At the same time, the story of capital, the contingent history of our falling into the Anthropocene, cannot be denied by recourse to the idea of species, for the Anthropocene would not have been possible, even as a theory, without the history of industrialization. How do we hold the two together as we think the history of the world since the Enlightenment? How do we relate to a universal history of life – to universal thought, that is – while retaining what is of obvious value in our postcolonial suspicion of the universal? The crisis of climate change calls for thinking simultaneously on both registers, to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capital and species history. This combination, however, stretches, in quite fundamental ways, the very idea of historical understanding.

Thesis 4: The cross-hatching of species history and the history of capital is a process of probing the limits of historical understanding

Historical understanding, one could say following the Diltheyan tradition, entails critical thinking that makes an appeal to some generic ideas about human experience. As Gadamer pointed out, Dilthey saw "the individual's private world of experience as the starting point for an expansion that, in a living transposition, fills out the narrowness and fortuitousness of his private experience with the infinity of what is available by re-experiencing the historical world." "Historical consciousness," in this tradition, is thus "a mode of self-knowledge" garnered through critical reflections on one's own and others' (historical actors') experiences.[57] Humanist histories of capitalism will always admit of something called the experience of capitalism. E. P. Thompson's brilliant attempt to reconstruct working-class experience of capitalist labour, for instance, does not make sense without that assumption.[58] Humanist histories are histories that produce meaning through an appeal to our capacity not only to reconstruct but, as Collingwood would have said, to re-enact in our own minds the experience of the past.

When Wilson then recommends in the interest of our collective future that we achieve self-understanding as a species, the statement does not correspond to any historical way of understanding and connecting pasts with futures through the assumption of there being an element of continuity to human experience. (See Gadamer's point mentioned above.) Whois the we? Wehumans never experience ourselves as a species.Wecan only intellectually comprehend or infer the existence of the human species but never experience it as such. There could be no phenomenology of us as a species. Even if we were to emotionally identify with a word like mankind, we would not know what being a species is, for, in species history, humans are only an instance of the concept species as indeed would be any other life form. But one never experiences being a concept.

The discussion about the crisis of climate change can thus produce affect and knowledge about collective human pasts and futures that work at the limits of historical understanding. We experience specific effects of the crisis but not the whole phenomenon. Do we then say, with Geyer and Bright, that "humanity no longer comes into being through 'thought'" ("WH," p. 1060) or say with Foucault that "the human being no longer has any history"?[59] Geyer and Bright go on to write in a Foucaultian spirit: "Its [world history's] task is to make transparent the lineaments of power, underpinned by information, that compress humanity into a single humankind" ("WH," p. 1060).

This critique that sees humanity as an effect of power is, of course, valuable for all the hermeneutics of suspicion that it has taught postcolonial scholarship. It is an effective critical tool in dealing with national and global formations of domination. But I do not find it adequate in dealing with the crisis of global warming. First, inchoate figures of us all and other imaginings of humanity invariably haunt our sense of the current crisis. How else would one understand the title of Weisman's book, The World without Us, or the appeal of his brilliant though impossible attempt to depict the experience of New York after we are gone![60] Second, the wall between human and natural history has been breached. We may not experience ourselves as a geological agent, but we appear to have become one at the level of the species. And without that knowledge that defies historical understanding there is no making sense of the current crisis that affects us all. Climate change, refracted through global capital, will no doubt accentuate the logic of inequality that runs through the rule of capital; some people will no doubt gain temporarily at the expense of others. But the whole crisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism. Unlike in the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged (witness the drought in Australia or recent fires in the wealthy neighbourhoods of California). The anxiety global warming gives rise to is reminiscent of the days when many feared a global nuclear war. But there is a very important difference. A nuclear war would have been a conscious decision on the part of the powers that be. Climate change is an unintended consequence of human actions and shows, only through scientific analysis, the effects of our actions as a species. Species may indeed be the name of a placeholder for an emergent, new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of the danger that is climate change. But we can never understand this universal. It is not a Hegelian universal arising dialectically out of the movement of history, or a universal of capital brought forth by the present crisis. Geyer and Bright are right to reject those two varieties of the universal. Yet climate change poses for us a question of a human collectivity, an us, pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience the world. It is more like a universal that arises from a shared sense of a catastrophe. It calls for a global approach to politics without the myth of a global identity, for, unlike a Hegelian universal, it cannot subsume particularities. We may provisionally call it a "negative universal history."[61]


This essay is dedicated to the memory of Greg Dening. Thanks are due to Lauren Berlant, James Chandler, Carlo Ginzburg, Tom Mitchell, Sheldon Pollock, Bill Brown, Françoise Meltzer, Debjani Ganguly, Ian Hunter, Julia A. Thomas, and Rochona Majumdar for critical comments on an earlier draft. I wrote the first version of this essay in Bengali for a journal in Calcutta and remain grateful to its editor, Asok Sen, for encouraging me to work on this topic.



[1] Alan Weisman, The World without Us (New York, 2007), pp. 3-5.
[2] See C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, Mass., 2004).
[3] The prehistory of the science of global warming going back to nineteenth-century European scientists like Joseph Fourier, Louis Agassiz, and Arrhenius is recounted in many popular publications. See, for example, the book by Bert Bolin, the chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1988-1997), A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, 2007), pt. 1.
[4] Quoted in Mark Bowen, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming (New York, 2008), p. 1.
[5] Quoted in ibid., p. 228. See also "Too Hot to Handle: Recent Efforts to Censor Jim Hansen," Boston Globe, 5 Feb. 2006, p. E1.
[6] See, for example, Walter K. Dodds, Humanity's Footprint: Momentum, Impact, and Our Global Environment (New York, 2008), pp. 11-62.
[7] Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (1994; London, 2006), p. 356; see Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London, 2007), pp. 227-389.
[8] An indication of the growing popularity of the topic is the number of books published in the last four years with the aim of educating the general reading public about the nature of the crisis. Here is a random list of some of the most recent titles that inform this essay: Mark Maslin, Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2004); Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change (Melbourne, 2005); David Archer, Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast (Malden, Mass., 2007); Global Warming, ed. Kelly Knauer (New York, 2007); Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington, D.C., 2008); William H. Calvin, Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change (Chicago, 2008); James Hansen, "Climate Catastrophe," New Scientist, 28 July-3 Aug. 2007, pp. 30-34; Hansen et al., "Dangerous Human-Made Interference with Climate: A GISS ModelE Study," Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 7, no. 9 (2007): 2287-2312; and Hansen et al., "Climate Change and Trace Gases," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 15 July 2007, pp. 1925-54. See also Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The "Stern Review" (Cambridge, 2007).
[9] Naomi Oreskes, "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We're Not Wrong?" in Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren, ed. Joseph F. C. Dimento and Pamela Doughman (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), pp. 73, 74.
[10] A long history of this distinction is traced in Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (1979; Chicago, 1984).
[11] Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood (1913; New Brunswick, N.J., 2002), p. 5. Carlo Ginzburg has alerted me to problems with Collingwood's translation.
[12] See the discussion in Perez Zagorin, "Vico's Theory of Knowledge: A Critique," Philosophical Quarterly 34 (Jan. 1984): 15-30.
[13] Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, trans. pub., 3 vols. (Moscow, 1969), 1:398. See V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (London, 1941). Indeed, Althusser's revolt in the 1960s against humanism in Marx was in part a jihad against the remnants of Vico in the savant's texts; see Étienne Balibar, personal communication to author, 1 Dec. 2007. I am grateful to Ian Bedford for drawing my attention to complexities in Marx's connections to Vico.
[14] David Roberts describes Collingwood as "the lonely Oxford historicist [...], in important respects a follower of Croce's" (David D. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism [Berkeley, 1987], p. 325).
[15] On Croce's misreading of Vico, see the discussion in general in Cecilia Miller, Giambattista Vico: Imagination and Historical Knowledge (Basingstoke, 1993), and James C. Morrison, "Vico's Principle of Verum is Factum and the Problem of Historicism," Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (Oct.-Dec. 1978): 579-95.
[16] Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946; New York, 1976), pp. 214, 212, 213, 216.
[17] Ibid., p. 193.
[18] Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism, pp. 59, 60, 62.
[19] Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), www.marxists.org
[20] Fernand Braudel, "Preface to the First Edition," The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (1949; London, 1972), 1:20. See also Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The "Annales" School, 1929-89 (Stanford, Calif., 1990), pp. 32-64.
[21] See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (1975, 1979; London, 1988), pp. 214-18. See also Bonnie G. Smith, "Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: The Seminar and Archival Research in the Nineteenth Century," American Historical Review 100 (Oct. 1995): 1150-76.
[22] Braudel, "Preface to the First Edition," p. 20.
[23] Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1972; London, 2003), p. xxv.
[24] See Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, 2008), pp. 74-189.
[25] Oreskes, "The Scientific Consensus," p. 93.
[26] Crosby Jr., "The Past and Present of Environmental History," American Historical Review 100 (Oct. 1995): 1185.
[27] Will Steffen, director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University, quoted in "Humans Creating New ŒGeological Age,'" The Australian, 31 Mar. 2008, www.theaustralian.news.com.au. Steffen's reference was the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report of 2005. See also Neil Shubin, "The Disappearance of Species," Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 61 (Spring 2008): 17-19.
[28] Bill McKibben's argument about the "end of nature" implied the end of nature as "a separate realm that had always served to make us feel smaller" (Bill McKibben, The End of Nature [1989; New York, 2006], p. xxii).
[29] Bruno Latour's Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (1999; Cambridge, Mass., 2004), written before the intensification of the debate on global warming, calls into question the entire tradition of organizing the idea of politics around the assumption of a separate realm of nature and points to the problems that this assumption poses for contemporary questions of democracy.
[30] Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 206: The historian "knows that everything could have been different, and every acting individual could have acted differently."
[31] Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, "The Anthropocene," IGBP [International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme] Newsletter 41 (2000): 17; hereafter abbreviated "A."
[32] Crutzen, "Geology of Mankind," Nature, 3 Jan. 2002, p. 23.
[33] Mike Davis, "Living on the Ice Shelf: Humanity's Meltdown," 26 June 2008, tomdispatch.com/post/174949; hereafter abbreviated "LIS." I am grateful to Lauren Berlant for bringing this essay to my attention.
[34] See William F. Ruddiman, "The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago," Climatic Change 61, no. 3 (2003): 261-93; Crutzen and Steffen, "How Long Have We Been in the Anthropocene Era?" Climatic Change 61, no. 3 (2003): 251-57; and Jan Zalasiewicz et al., "Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?" GSA Today 18 (Feb. 2008): 4-8. I am grateful to Neptune Srimal for this reference.
[35] Zalasiewicz et al., "Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?" p. 7. Davis described the London Society as "the world's oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807" ("LIS").
[36] See, for instance, Libby Robin and Steffen, "History for the Anthropocene," History Compass 5, no. 5 (2007): 1694-1719, and Jeffrey D. Sachs, "The Anthropocene," Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (New York, 2008), pp. 57-82. Thanks to Debjani Ganguly for drawing my attention to the essay by Robin and Steffen, and to Robin for sharing it with me.
[37] Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York, 2002), p. 102; hereafter abbreviated FL.
[38] See Latour, Politics of Nature.
[39] Flannery, The Weather Makers, p. xiv.
[40] Maslin, Global Warming, p. 147. For a discussion of how fossil fuels created both the possibilities for and the limits of democracy in the twentieth century, see Timothy Mitchell, "Carbon Democracy," forthcoming in Economy and Society. I am grateful to Mitchell for letting me cite this unpublished paper.
[41] Wilson, In Search of Nature (Washington, D.C., 1996), pp. ix-x; hereafter abbreviated SN.
[42] See Smail, On Deep History and the Brain.
[43] Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, "World History in a Global Age," American Historical Review 100 (Oct. 1995): 1058-59; hereafter abbreviated "WH."
[44] See Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, p. 124.
[45] Ibid. pp. 124-25.
[46] Jacques Derrida, "Cogito and the History of Madness," Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), p. 34.
[47] See Sachs, Common Wealth, pp. 57-82.
[48] Wilson, foreword to Sachs, Common Wealth, p. xii. Students of Marx may be reminded here of the use of the category "species being" by the young Marx.
[49] See Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000).
[50] See Mitchell, "Carbon Democracy." See also Edwin Black, Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives (New York, 2006).
[51] Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century is a good guide to these fluctuations in the fortunes of capitalism.
[52] Lawrence Guy Straus, "The World at the End of the Last Ice Age," in Humans at the End of the Ice Age: The Archaeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition, ed. Lawrence Guy Straus et al. (New York, 1996), p. 5.
[53] Flannery, Weather Makers, pp. 63, 64.
[54] Ashish Kothari, "The Reality of Climate Injustice," The Hindu, 18 Nov. 2007, www.hinduonnet.com
[55] I have borrowed the idea of "retrospective" and "prospective" guilt from a discussion led at the Franke Institute for the Humanities by Peter Singer during the Chicago Humanities Festival, November 2007.
[56] See Colin Tudge, Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began (New Haven, Conn., 1999), pp. 35-36.
[57] Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 232, 234. See also Michael Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago, 1978), pp. 310-22.
[58] See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1963).
[59] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Knowledge, trans. pub. (1966; New York, 1973), p. 368.
[60] See Weisman, The World without Us, pp. 25-28. Critical Inquiry / Winter 2009 221
[61] I am grateful to Antonio Y. Vasquez-Arroyo for sharing with me his unpublished paper "Universal History Disavowed: On Critical Theory and Postcolonialism," where he has tried to develop this concept of negative universal history on the basis of his reading of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.