Arendt and Intergenerational Justice

“If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men…. There is perhaps no clearer testimony to the loss of the public realm in the modern age than the almost complete loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss somewhat overshadowed by the simultaneous loss of the metaphysical concern with eternity.”

--Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Intergenerational justice is a central idea in contemporary political thought about the environment, sustainability and global climate change. That we must live today in a manner that does not degrade the life chances of future generations is an intellectual response to the depletion of natural resources, particularly fossil fuels, and the global warming fostered by the use of these sources of energy. As one political response to climate change caused by fossil fuel use, intergenerational justice may be described in terms of a revivifying of public life and a corresponding cultivation of trust in politics. That is to say, intergenerational justice is conceived best not in abstract terms, but as a matter of directing concrete political action, which Arendt argues has a transformative nature, against the anti-political and anti-ecological encroachments of “the social realm” that prioritizes economic thinking, growth and bureaucratic efficiency over concerns for the future. In this sense, we appeal to Arendt, who shows us in On Revolution that the founding of new public space and the revitalization of citizenship are always possible.

We glimpse moments of the founding potential of politics in the wake of disasters, as Rebecca Solnit has shown in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. She offers case studies that show spontaneous acts of generosity, democratic community, cooperation and altruism as the truest or “natural” response to earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and explosions.

However, there is the counter, anti-political image of what happens in the wake of human-made or natural instability presented by Naomi Wolfe in The Shock Doctrine. Here free-market ideologues take advantage of political instability created by natural disaster or coup d’état to foster “disaster capitalism” often through the destruction of indigenous institutions and the use of torture. This mode of capitalism flourishes amid devastation through the domestication of the public sphere, the legitimizing rhetoric of laissez-faire economics, and a stable investment climate ensured by authoritarian governance.

The accounts presented by Solnit and Wolfe illuminate both the hidden politics of natural disasters and the possibility of democratic and totalitarian paths to ecological sustainability. A third path is utter ecosystem collapse where what is sustainable does not include humans (and this would be described best as a failure of politics). What we need to acknowledge is there is no guarantee that a sustainable future will be achieved. If such a future is to be attained, preferably through political action as opposed to calamity, then what counts as our public sphere, the space between people where collective actions can be fashioned and performed, has to be regenerated. There is little doubt that the public realm experienced by citizens of developed nations today is impoverished, and this condition contributes to this generation’s inability to comprehend and respond effectively to the current and impending ecological crisis.

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The unsustainability of the planetary economy is empirical. Calculations of the human footprint or ecological damage created by current economic activity by William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel, along with scholars from the field of ecological economics, show that we are living on a planet and a half as a result of the stored solar energy in fossil fuels. If everyone on Earth lived like Americans, then we would be living on four planets. This existence beyond the capacity of Earth’s ecosystems to support our level of economic activity is what constitutes unsustainability today. It is not unlike the way the Sahara encroaches on the already scarce arable land in Mauritania, or how sea levels rise and infiltrate the fresh water systems of low lying areas like Bangladesh or island nations like the Maldives. It can be measured in the rising acidity and temperatures of the planet’s oceans, the rapid decline of coral reef systems, and the melting of the polar icecaps. The losses of biodiversity incurred daily are measurable and accelerating. However, there are still no global governmental responses that recognize that the limits to economic growth have been reached. As the situation appears dire, and conditions of scarcity arise, we can imagine a scenario in which popular support concretizes for totalitarian-like measures in the face of impending annihilation.

Arendt presented a series of challenges to the predominant paradigm in economics that conceived of things like clean air, water and industrial pollution as somehow external to the economy. For adherents to the Neoclassical Paradigm in Economics, these externalities are not factored in because nature is in this school of thought conceived as limitless with respect to its resources and resilience. Such a dichotomous treatment of nature and human activity, Arendt posited, helps justify reductive views of humans as homo faber – “a destroyer of nature” – and homo economicus, an insatiable producer and consumer. For Arendt, through labor and work we have fabricated what we understand to be our shared world in such a way that human/nature bifurcations have been obviated. In rethinking the human versus nature binary, Arendt cultivated an integrated ontological groundwork (without externalities) for political actions engendered by ecological threats to the survival of future generations of humans.

There is such political action now evident in the distinctive arenas of public policy and mass movement politics. These areas of action evince hope for the revitalization of the political sphere and a sustainable future. But these public approaches to sustainability are pluralistic and occasionally in opposition. There are proponents of a soft path to sustainability, which places enormous faith in science, technology and environmental policy to meet the challenges of environmental degradation as they arise. The soft path proceeds incrementally, and while it might work to ameliorate some of the more devastating effects of climate change and ease the transition from fossil fuels to nonrenewable energy sources, what is missed in this approach is the complexity and stochastic character of ecosystems under stressed conditions. Moreover, presupposed in the soft path are an underlying distrust of democratic politics and an image of science as the producer of truths that are uncontestable.

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Arendt presented an account of truth and science that is much more amenable to the character of ecology as a science and sustainability as a matter of political and moral change in the hard path. Ecology is a producer of what Arendt described in “Truth and Politics” as “factual truths.” Scientists concerned with diagnosing what is unsustainable and destructive in our age produce truths about ecosystems that are “political by nature.” These truths must be presented persuasively in opposition to other perspectives and their corresponding evidence (or lack thereof) with the goal of gaining acceptance in the political sphere. The hard path to sustainability is one paved by moral and political transformation, a process which is informed by factual truths directed toward the creation of a global political economy that is both downsized to fit the planet’s resources and opposed to blind economic growth. While the soft and hard paths to a sustainable global economy are not mutually exclusive, the soft path does undermine the need for political action by promoting a view of sustainability as a problem for technocrats and other kinds of experts to solve. This deprives our political life of the sense of urgency that the growing signs of ecological catastrophe demand. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake for proponents of the hard path to take on an antagonistic stance against science and technology.

The obstacle of an attenuated space for political action and judgment is not, we must trust, insurmountable. What we must face is the reality of the impending ecological crises already visible in species loss; CO2 levels; warming and acidifying oceans; desertification; and the fastest growing population on earth today, that of environmental refugees. Spontaneity, uncertainty and upheaval are our lot. “Hence,” as Arendt wrote in On Revolution in reference to the existence of nuclear arms, “whatever the outcome of our present predicaments may be, if we don’t perish together, it seems more likely that revolution, in distinction to war, will stay with us into the foreseeable future.” A sturdy guide to political rebirth can be fashioned from present humans in love with their yet-to-be-born progeny. This love is the most humanly “authentic concern for immortality.”

--Christopher C. Robinson