Imperiled Life. Javier Sethness
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the problem that “at least partly deflec[t] our attention from what it is.”[12]
Far from subscribing to philosophical idealism, Schell hardly considers the threat of humanity’s collective suicide at the hands of nuclear weapons just “something to contemplate.” He emphasizes that it is instead “something to rebel against” and ultimately defeat. On his account, recognition of the peril posed by nuclear weapons could in concrete terms lead first to the development of a subject that could carry out the abolition of nuclear weapons and second to the reorganization of global human society along lines that would minimize the chance that they be constructed again. Humanity in this sense is called to break with the “resignation and acceptance” with which many persons approach individual death, and come to engage in “arousal, rejection, indignation, and action” aimed at overthrowing the threat of the death of the species by means of nuclear self-destruction.[13]
Despite the enormity of the problem, overthrowing existing social relations is in fact a possibility, claims Schell. It is still possible for humanity to prevail in this sense, on Schell’s account, though the abolition of the threat of nuclear annihilation would demand thoroughgoing sociopolitical change of an unprecedented scale. The chance for such change could begin only through recognizing that the world’s prevailing modes of political organization, in failing to resolve the very real threat posed to life by nuclear weapons, are in “drastic need of replacement.”[14] In place of the exercise of statecraft, people would “reinvent” politics and “reinvent” the world.[15] The action of a self-conscious humanity would institute the principle whereby humans have no right to destroy the “earthly creation on which everyone depends for survival” and would overturn the despair that prevails under conditions in which hope for survival is itself jeopardized. Against the remarkable lack of action on the part of constituted power to ensure survival, then, humanity in general could counterpose a “worldwide program of action for preserving the species.” Such an end demands that the “politics of the earth” be “revolutionize[d],” for only a “revolution in thought and in action” will allow for survival. The choice for Schell is quite simply “extinction” or “global political revolution”: “Our present system and the institutions that make it up are the debris of history. They have become inimical to life, and must be swept away. They constitute a noose around the neck of mankind [sic], threatening to choke off the human future, but we can cut the noose and break free.” Humans in this sense are called to become “partners in the protection of life itself” rather than the “allies of death.” Schell envisions “all human beings” coming together to “join in a defensive alliance, with nuclear weapons as their common enemy.”[16]
Schell’s concern in The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition is not exactly to explore the possible nature of such a conscious political movement, but he does at times make fragmentary comments regarding it. For him, the imperative of survival demands that each person take on a “share of the responsibility for guaranteeing the existence of all future generations.” The institution of action motivated by such maxims would establish a “new relationship among human beings”—one basing itself in a sociable responsibility for others. Indeed, Schell writes that the “first principle” of the movement on the part of a conscious humanity in defense of life would be “respect for human beings, born and unborn, based on our common love of life and our common jeopardy in the face of our own destructive powers and inclinations.”[17]
In Kantian terms, no human being, whether currently existing or rationally expected to come into life in the future, would be “regarded as an auxiliary” within the new political world to be fashioned by conscious opponents of extinction. Radical exclusion, that is, would be a reality to overcome in the bringing about of an Earth liberated from nuclear weapons. This point is particularly relevant to a consideration of the fate of potential future generations, whose very future birth is imperiled by nuclear weapons. “Love,” in Schell’s view, “can enable them to be,” by resolving the arrangements that threaten to “shut [them] up in nothingness” forever.[18]
According to Schell, the abolition of the state form is central to the task of resisting the total darkness of nuclear annihilation. Those societies that possess nuclear weapons have placed a “higher value on national sovereignty” than on human survival, writes Schell, as they are “ultimately prepared to bring an end to [humanity] in their attempt to protect their own countries.” In a real way, the threat of extinction follows from the division of the world’s peoples and territories into sovereign states, for the state and its war-making capacities have been preserved even following the advent of nuclear arms, at the cost of all human life. The alternative to such death as proposed by Schell is that the world’s states relinquish their sovereignty, destroy nuclear weapons, dismantle offensive military capabilities, and establish a global political system in which violence has ceased to be the final arbiter.[19]
Prior to a look at current climatological findings, some commentary on Schell’s views as presented here is in order. The similarities between Schell’s account of the threat of nuclear annihilation and the present climate predicament should be fairly clear, since they are “two of a kind,” as Schell himself recognizes in a January 2010 interview.[20] The perpetuation of dangerous human interference with Earth’s climate systems, like the prospect of nuclear war, would be “irredeemably senseless,” and may even threaten oblivion for humanity.[21] If we are to attempt to even begin resolving the threats posed by climate change and nuclear arms—if we are to avoid becoming “the allies of death” and “underwriters of the slaughter of billions of innocent people”—we must rebel with the aim of overthrowing that which exists, as Schell and other commentators rightly note—and as our own reason and conscience would demand.[22]
Besides the justified urgency that motivates Schell’s works, much of the commentary he makes on the sociopolitical implications of the nuclear arms problem bears consideration. It is the historical division of the world into sovereign states that raises the threat of nuclear annihilation in the first place, and it is the perpetuation of this state system that defends the capitalist mode of production threatening climate catastrophe. “The state of death is identical to that of sovereignty,” Benjamin writes—or at least it threatens to be so.[23] The nuclear danger continues to exist as long as nuclear weapons and the states that protect them exist too; as Chomsky observes, it has effectively been a “miracle” that nuclear arms have not again been directly employed against persons since their first use in August 1945.[24] Similarly, the threat of irradiation of the biosphere that would follow from the related problem of a full-blown meltdown at any one of the hundreds of the world’s nuclear energy plants lives on, as the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima-Daichi site reminds us. This risk persists insofar as such technologies are generally found to be acceptable.
Considerations regarding human vulnerability to these various threats have guided popular mobilizations in opposition to technological madness in antinuclear movements past and present. This movement from below—desde abajo y a la izquierda (“from below and to the left”), as the neo-Zapatistas put it—would do well to heed Schell’s call for an association to overthrow social exclusion, both for the presently suffering social majorities and the expected future generations, and in so doing, institute a political act of love and respect. Particularly important for this end, as Schell contends, is the task of examining the depth of the peril and the darkness it promises. To contemplate recent climatological findings on the current and possible future state of Earth’s climate systems is to confirm Benjamin’s diagnosis of the prevailing state of affairs as amounting to an emergency that demands revolutionary resolution.
The Breadth of Climate Barbarism
The need to lend suffering a voice is a condition for all truth.
—Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics
In the estimation of world-renowned NASA climatologist James Hansen, “Planet Earth . . . is in imminent peril,” is “in imminent danger of crashing,” precisely because of the dangerous interference since the rise of industrial capitalism by the West and its followers with Earth’s climate systems.[25] This interference—driven primarily by the use of fossil fuels, which in turn have driven economic expansion and attendant explosions of social inequality since the origins of modernity—has caused the atmospheric carbon