GAIA AND THE PATH OF THE EARTH: LOVELOCK/ ILLICH/ LATOUR
I have had a long-standing interest in the claim of British scientist Jim Lovelock that the earth as a whole is self-regulating – his Gaia Hypothesis, so called – and I featured Lovelock several times during my years at Ideas at CBC Radio.[1] During those years, the preeminent influence on my thinking was the philosopher of technology Ivan Illich. But, when I tried, on more than one occasion, to discuss the Gaia theory with him, his response was disparaging. Lovelock’s theory, he said, was a travesty, an empty abstraction untrue to the living earth and “inimical to what earth is.”[2] Now, nearly thirty years after Illich made these remarks, a new interpretation of Lovelock’s theory has appeared. It comes from French philosopher of science Bruno Latour in a book called Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Latour claims that Lovelock’s hypothesis, properly understood, is as significant as Galileo’s reimagination of the heavens in the early 17th century, and that it is much less inimical to an embodied experience of place than Illich had supposed. This has challenged me to revisit Illich’s objections to Gaia à la Lovelock and to ask whether Latour’s new interpretation can answer them. I will begin by introducing Lovelock’s theory:
In 1965 Jim Lovelock was working at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), a joint initiative of NASA and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. His assignment was to devise instruments that could detect life on Mars, should there be any. In thinking about this problem, he had the inspired idea of turning his question around and asking, in effect, how a Martian would know that there is life on earth. This brought to his attention the earth’s unlikely atmosphere, a mix of gases as unstable, Lovelock has joked, as those mingled in the intake manifold of a car. Why don’t these gases react with one another until they eventually reach that state of chemical equilibrium that had recently been shown to characterize the atmospheres of Mars or Venus? How is such a “giant disequilibrium” maintained? The answer came “in a flash,” Lovelock told me in one of the several interviews I did with him for CBC Radio: “The organisms at the surface [of the earth] must be regulating the atmosphere.” “Not just putting gases in the atmosphere,” he reiterated to emphasize his point, but “regulating the atmosphere.”[3] Thus was born the Gaia hypothesis.
Lovelock, as he has now related in more than ten books on the subject, soon discovered many more ways in which living things produce their own environment. He has shown, for example, that marine creatures emit aerosols of sulfur and iodine in exactly the quantities required by creatures on the land where these crucial elements are deficient. He has demonstrated that earth’s biota remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the amounts necessary to maintain a comfortable climate. And he has established that forest fires help regulate the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere. The discovery of these mechanisms, and others like them, confirmed Lovelock’s initial intuition at JPL that the earth as a whole must engage in some form of self-regulation. The idea of naming this hypothesis after Gaia, the ancient Greek goddess of the earth, came from the novelist William Golding who was Lovelock’s friend, interlocutor and neighbour at the time Lovelock first began to explore the implications of his “flash” at JPL. So grand a theory, Golding said, deserved an equally grand name, and what better name than Gaia, mother of all, first to arise from primeval Chaos, oldest of the gods. Lovelock, fatefully, accepted his friend’s suggestion. “When you get given a name by a wordsmith of quality like Bill Golding,” he later told me, “you don’t turn it down. But, boy has it given me trouble.”[4]
The name, as Lovelock says, was a blessing and a curse in one. It attracted media attention, as the several broadcasts I did about it for Ideas testify, and it resonated with many counter-cultural movements – from that branch of feminism in which interest in goddesses was reviving, to the environmental movement which grew out of the first Earth Day in 1970, to the hippie cultural ecologists who were advocating retooling, degrowth and a return to earth. Musician Paul Winter composed a mass, the Missa Gaia, that was first presented at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in 1982; writer William Irwin Thompson made the name a sign of a new way of thinking in a book he edited called Gaia: A Way of Knowing. But, at the same time, this cultural and philosophical resonance became a source of derision amongst Lovelock’s scientific colleagues – the trouble he referred to above. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that the theory struck him as “a metaphor, not a mechanism,” and many other leading biologists rejected it out of hand as well.[5] Some of this condescension and disregard was rooted in the theory’s cultural associations, but it also arose from the sense that Lovelock’s hypothesis offended and threatened neo-Darwinian orthodoxy.
Modern sciences rest on the banishment of any idea of end, goal or purpose from their accounts. Aristotle held that each thing was determined by its end or final cause, as well as by its material character and the forces acting on it. Objects fall to earth because they seek their “natural place” – it is in their nature to do so. 17th century natural philosophy subtracted this idea. It held that things move only because some overt and discernible force pushes them – everything can be reduced to matter in motion, “Occult” causes were ruled out. Purpose was driven out of science and thereby fated to return endlessly as heresy. In the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy that ruled evolutionary biology at the time Lovelock first presented his hypothesis, it was an axiom that change could not arise by any purposeful process – e.g. giraffes developed long necks so they could reach high branches – but only by random mutation which might confer an advantage in what Darwin called the struggle for existence – a giraffe with a longer neck, by happy chance, appeared and was then rewarded with more food and more progeny. In this context Lovelock’s idea of planetary self-regulation looked like the latest version of the perennial heresy that had erupted in Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of evolution, in which new “needs” call forth new habits, or in Hans Driesch’s “vitalist” developmental biology in which “entelechies” governed embryological development, and in many other such attempts to reintroduce teleology to biology. (Teleology, from telos the Greek word for end of goal, refers to any sequence determined by its end and not by a chain of antecedent mechanical causes.) What evolutionary advantage could there be for marine creatures in producing dimethyl sulfide or methyl iodide in the exact quantities required on the land, or in producing the nuclei which allow clouds to condense and form in just the amount needed to radiate light away from the earth and preserve its comfortable temperature? These phenomena might demonstrably occur, but they must be only fortunate accidents or coincidences, not elements of self-regulation.
Lovelock learned to answer these objections in several registers. He stopped saying that “living organisms” were producing their own environment and began to say that “the whole system” was involved.[6] He drew attention to the baffling properties of cybernetic systems in which causation is circular rather than linear. Once a domestic thermostat is set, the temperature regulates the furnace, and the furnace regulates the temperature in an endless circle of which neither is the cause. The Gaia hypothesis models such a circular process, Lovelock said, whereas modern sciences had previously used linear mathematics to model linear, cause-and-effect processes. He recognized, of course, that a thermostat must be set by someone before it falls into its homeostatic pattern of self-regulation. The system must have a goal or end-state which governs its self-regulation. In the case of Gaia, he claimed that this goal was set by “the properties of the universe.” Because carbon-based life forms are “quite fussy about the range of temperatures and conditions at which they can exist,” these tolerances “set the goal of the self-regulating system Gaia.”[7]
In effect, Lovelock argued that the earth itself is a unit of evolution, still subject to natural selection but on a cosmic or universal scale where the selection pressures are established by the parameters of life itself. He was not contradicting or replacing Darwinian theory by this hypothesis, he said, he was only supplementing it by enlarging its frame. Just as Newtonian physics had worked fine until Einstein pushed it to the limit at which it broke down, so Darwinian principles of natural selection had been sufficient until the planet as a whole was considered. Only when Earth was observed from outside, as it was for the first time in Lovelock’s thought experiment during NASA’s Mars mission, did it become necessary to ask whether Earth itself evolves. People had known for a long time that it changed – they had, for centuries, hunted fossils, measured the age of rocks, and charted the advance retreat of glaciers – but they had still taken that “Nature” which governs “natural selection” for granted as the context in which evolution operates. Lovelock by considering the earth as a whole had identified properties that belonged to it only as a whole, properties that could not be reduced to more rudimentary terms.
Lovelock’s theory was initially polarizing and controversial. The problems, as I mentioned earlier, began with the grandiloquent name that was William Golding’s equivocal gift. The name expanded the idea’s cultural reach but poisoned its scientific reception, creating the view that Lovelock’s hypothesis was, as an editor at Nature said, “a danger to science.”[8] Leading biologists denounced the theory as mystical para-science, rather than as the fruitful and fully testable proposal that Lovelock showed, again and again, that it was. This disdain began to abate during the 1990’s when Lovelock decided it was time he talked directly to opinion leaders in biology. In England, at the time, this group included Robert May, John Maynard Smith and William Hamilton, all or whom Lovelock sought out. They told him they thought his theory was nonsense. He asked if they had read any of his papers. They admitted that they had not and were relying entirely on the opinions of their graduate students. Once they became acquainted with what he was actually saying, Lovelock says, “they swung right round,” accepting the evidence for self-regulation while still insisting on the challenge this evidence posed to neo-Darwinian theory.[9] Parallel scientific developments also assisted Lovelock’s cause and made his theory seem less exotic and less threatening. These included the emergence of various new sciences employing similar concepts of self-organization and self-regulation as those which Lovelock was developing. Where things stand today is a question somewhat beyond my competence. There is no body which grants scientific theories the equivalent of the imprimatur – let it be printed – by which the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church certifies books. But I do have the impression that Lovelock’s theory is today better understood and more widely accepted than ever before. In 2001, for example, four scientific organizations, operating “global change research programmes,” met in Amsterdam and released a Declaration on Earth System Science which stated that, “The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components”[10]
ILLICH’S OBJECTIONS
At this point, I want to introduce Ivan Illich and his critique of the Gaia theory. Illich, for the first twenty years of his adult life, was a Roman Catholic priest. He worked during that time to declericalize and transform the Church. These efforts brought him into conflict with the Roman Curia. In 1968, he was subjected to formal processes of inquisition, and, the following year, the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) which he directed in Cuernavaca, Mexico was placed under a ban. He withdrew from church service and during the 1970’s produced a series of ever more wide-ranging critiques of contemporary institutions, techniques, and social practices. Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Medical Nemesis, and several other such works all argued that modern institutions had become counter-productive monopolies which defeated their own purposes and stifled popular initiative. As he went on, he inquired more deeply into the “certainties” underlying. contemporary ways of life and the ways in which our technologies, through what Marshall McLuhan called their “symbolic fallout,” tell us not just what we should do but what we are. He also explored the ways in which the Roman Catholic Church had served as the incubator of modernity, perfecting not just the institutional forms that would become characteristic of modern societies but also that care of souls that brought the faithful under minute and detailed clerical regulation and created the template for modern service bureaucracies.
I got to know Illich fairly well during the last fifteen years of his life – he died in 2002 – and I had the privilege of doing several extended interviews with him, two of which became books – 1992’s Ivan Illich in Conversation and the posthumous The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich, published in 2005. A third book, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, an account of his life and thought many years in the making, has just been published by the Penn State Press. One of the subjects I several times tried to bring up was Lovelock’s Gaia theory, a theme on which I was enthusiastic. As I said earlier, I did three lengthy interviews with Lovelock during my career at Ideas. I featured him alongside David Bohm, Ilya Prigogine, and Rupert Sheldrake in a series called “Religion and the New Science” in 1985; presented a full hour called “The Gaia Hypothesis,” in 1992; and devoted an episode of “How To Think About Science” to Lovelock’s story in 2008. Illich was not really interested, essentially refusing to discuss a theory which he claimed is “inimical to what earth is.” I found this somewhat exasperating. I wanted to discuss the merits of the theory; he insisted that there was nothing to discuss since there was no difference between “that kind of science and religion.” He said little more, but I return to these sparse remarks now, nonetheless, because I want to try and understand what it was that Illich objected to, and then to consider whether Bruno Latour’s construal of the Gaia theory gives a satisfactory answer to Illich’s objections.
Illich concluded, during the 1980’s, that the world in which he was living had reached and was passing a watershed. This change surprised him. It was, he said, “a passage [which] I had not expected, in my lifetime, to observe.”[11] A “catastrophic break” had occurred which had made “the mental space,” “the conceptual and perceptual topology,” in which we now live “non-continuous with the past.” This rupture, he. believed, had invalidated many of the assumptions on which he had based the “call for institutional revolution” that informed many of his books of the 1970’s.[12] He had thought of institutions like education or medicine as instrumental creations, brought into being to serve the purposes of a citizenry or a public who were able to use them for the purposes for which they had been designed. “I was still thinking,” he told me in 1998, “of someone who stood in front of large institutions with the idea, at least, that he could use them for the satisfaction of his own dreams, or his own needs.”[13] It followed that he could address these someones about the dangers these institutions posed when they outgrew their proper size and scale and became what Illich called radical monopolies. And it followed, further, that he could hope to assemble a political majority capable of stopping and permanently limiting this counterproductive growth. His “deschooling” proposal provides a simple example. He wanted to “disestablish” educational systems by removing their legal right to make their services compulsory. Implied was the idea of a citizenry that stood apart from such systems and was capable of evaluating them on instrumental grounds. If schools were frustrating their own stated purposes, then they could be changed.
What Illich began to notice in the 1980’s was that this instrumental logic no longer obtained. A new age had begun in which people were no longer distinct from the systems in which they took part. They had been, he supposed, “swallowed by the system.” He began to speak of the emergence of an “age of systems” or, alternately, of “an ontology of systems” in which being itself was conceived as a system.[14] The word, of course, is tricky – which isn’t? – because it can refer to anything that possesses some over-all integrity or constitutes an established way of doing things – any coherent plan or approach, from Hegel’s philosophy to someone’s special way of making coffee, can be called a system. Illich was not invoking these old meanings but pointing to something radically new – a system so total and comprehensive that there could be no ground or standpoint outside it. The very idea of a tool or an instrumental means, he argued, depended on a distinction between that tool and its user. A system in the contemporary sense incorporates its user – he/she becomes part of the system. One uses a hammer but joins a network.
Behind this distinction between tool and system lay an original historical analysis. The use of tools is often taken as a primordial and defining feature of humanity. The caveman in the museum diorama is already Man the Tool User. Some ethologists even ascribe tool use to the chimpanzees who sharpen sticks to fight or the birds who impale larvae on twigs. Illich thought differently. Until the 12th century, he said, with a few premonitory stirrings earlier, there was no general idea of tools. Tools remained inseparable from their users. Aristotle, for example, uses the same word for the tool and the hand that holds it. Tools remained attached and enculturated, limited to their accustomed uses. Then, for reasons I won’t go into here, a general science of tools began to appear. A technological revolution began. In the 12th century, even the newly defined seven sacraments were conceived as instruments or tools – peculiarly efficacious means of grace selected by theologians from the manifold blessings the Church had formerly pronounced on all the affairs of life and “used by God himself…as instrumental causes towards the desired end.”[15] The spirit of instrumentality, according to Illich, became the leading feature of the age which stretches from the 12th century to our own time, an age characterized by its “extraordinary intensity of purposefulness” and by its idea that to each end some special instrument must correspond. Even love, says Illich, becomes “an instrument for satisfaction”[16] There is nothing that is worth doing for its own sake, nothing good in itself, which will not finally be made to submit to a rational means/ends logic. Modernity, Illich says, was characterized by “the loss of gratuity.”[17] Even the word itself came to mean a negligible consideration – something beside the point, or, at most, a small addition, a tip. The good gave way to the valuable.
But this age is now ending, Illich says, succeeded by an Age of Systems. He left only a partial, sometimes disgruntled, occasionally caricatured account of this new reality, but, from scattered passages in his late works, the following outline can be assembled. I have already referred to the crucial feature: the lack of an outside. “Means of production,” to take Marx’s maximally general characterization of the ensemble of tools, can be put to any purpose – Communism was premised on the idea that changing the ownership of the means of production would be sufficient to turn the means of oppression into the means of liberation. It was already a great part of Illich’s argument in 1973’s Tools for Conviviality that this fond hope overlooked the inherent qualities of tools. “The issue at hand,” he wrote then, “is not the juridical ownership of tools, but rather the discovery of the characteristic of some tools which make it impossible for anybody to ‘own’ them. The concept of ownership cannot be applied to a tool that cannot be controlled.”[18] His solution then was to identify those tools that foster conviviality and proscribe those that lead to domination and monopoly. He spoke of “the roof of technological characteristics under which a society wants to live and be happy.”[19] This was a radical proposal, but it still implied the existence of a citizenry able to stand aside or apart from its technological array and ordain what is fit for use. Technology was no longer a neutral means in this account , but it remained a means. Systems, in the contemporary cybernetic sense, have lost this quality. A system, by definition, includes its user – there is no place to stand outside it. What disappears is what Illich sometimes called “distality,” although I don’t think the word was particularly helpful in conveying what he wanted to say. It’s a term that has its main uses in anatomy, dentistry and horticulture, where it refers to how distant something is from a defined centre or point of attachment – the growing tip of a plant is its distal portion. What Illich wanted, I think, was a term of art describing critical distance or distinction. It wasn’t a question of distality but of difference.
Illich was an apostle of otherness. His Christianity was Incarnational, and he understood the Incarnation as signifying that we encounter Christ in one another. “Whoever loves another,” he said, “loves [Christ] in the person of that other.”[20] When he spoke of the obedient listening that characterizes friendship, he described his posture as “bend[ing] over towards the total otherness of someone.” To “initiate a free relatedness,” he said, required that he “renounce searching for bridges between the other and myself [and] recognize…that a gulf separates us.” Across this gulf, “the only thing that reaches me is the other in his word, which I accept on faith.” The same point was made, again and again, in his misunderstood book Gender. Paraphrasing the argument of that book for me, he said that it described “the transition from one type of duality to another.”[21] In the first type which characterized “all worlds before our own,”[22] there were substantial differences that could be bridged only by imagination. “Otherness, even at the height of intimacy, was what gave ultimate consistency to what today we call consciousness.”[23] Modernity, for him, was defined by “the loss of the idea of otherness.” The constitutive and proportional pairs that had constituted all premodern worlds – heaven and earth, man and woman, here and there, macrocosm and microcosm – gave way to a world of universals. “The human being, the self, the individual became the model of our thinking.” The universal sustained many variations but it was fundamentally consistent. “The Cartesian inside,” Illich said, is only “a special zone within a more general space.” Goods circulate internationally without changing their character at borders. Sex circulates generally in bodies distinguished only by their plumbing.
Otherness was Illich’s great study because he believed that it is by this pathway that God’s word reaches us. The Incarnation, for him, is summed up in the saying, “the Word became flesh.”[24] In his early, more explicitly Christian writing, word is the metaphor by which he most frequently tries to express the meaning of the Christ’s appearance. Speaking of the Annunciation – the Gospel scene in which the angel tells Mary that she is to bear a divine child, a scene of crucial importance for Illich – he characterizes Mary’s stance as “openness to the Word.”[25] This openness has two aspects: one is the “silence” by which she enacts her awareness of “the distance …between…man…and God,” the other a disposition to be surprised. Distance here means difference, I think, as well as spatial extent. The angel’s greeting to Mary is homely and intimate – a domestic scene that has been evoked in countless poems, songs and paintings – and yet it crosses an unimaginable, unfathomable gulf – the ultimate otherness. This otherness, because it cannot be scrutinized or anticipated, can be disclosed only to those able to be surprised. The announcement to Mary – that God was to become “a living person, as human as you or I” – “is.” Illich writes, “a surprise, remains a surprise, and could not exist as anything else.”[26] A surprise, by definition, is what cannot be either anticipated or fully understood. It is also, for Illich, a permanent and desirable condition and not merely a momentary disorientation before we assimilate what has surprised us and learn henceforward to expect it. “Our hope of salvation,” he told the graduating class at the University of Puerto Rico in 1969, “lies in our being surprised by the Other. Let us learn always to receive further surprises. I decided long ago to hope for surprises until the final act of my life – that is to say, in death itself.”[27]
Illich claims that surprise is something more than Mary’s discomfiture at the angel’s unexpected and impossible claim. (“How can this be since I have no husband?”[28]) He says that it is the only mode in which The Incarnation can exist at all – “could not exist as anything else” – its permanent and unalterable condition. This is an inexhaustibly radical assertion. Arguably it contradicts the entire claim of Christian civilization – first to be able to discern God’s plan of salvation and, second, to be able to administer it through the Church and then through the Church’s secular descendants, the service institutions that were, as Illich says, “stamped from its mould.”[29] That’s a theme I have treated elsewhere.[30] What I want to emphasize here is that Illich’s understanding of the Incarnation hinges on otherness – the otherness of God and the otherness of the human other, as marked by that “gulf [that] separates us.” And this otherness is precisely what he thought was being lost with the unexpected “passage” into a new way of thinking, feeling and being, that “new perceptual and conceptual topology,” that startled him in the 1980’s.
Illich’s thinking throughout his life was concerned with borders, boundaries and distinctions. His entire effort in the 1970’s was aimed a writing a constitution of limits for contemporary societies. This required him to describe a boundary or a threshold at which liberal institutions turn into counter-productive “radical monopolies” which frustrate their own purposes. The “roof of technological characteristics under which a society wants to live and be happy” is another such boundary. He drew careful distinctions by which opposing domains could be divided, circumscribed, and kept to a scale at which they could be understood and controlled. He disparaged monopolies, in which one form, style, or mode predominates. The differences by which places, peoples and practices remained separate and defined were always prized. It was precisely this effort that he saw as threatened by the Age of Systems.
Modernity had continually eroded boundaries but had not challenged the boundary of the human person. Personhood, Illich says, is the idea in which Western humanism and individualism is “anchored.”[31] A person is a unique, bounded, and irreducible entity. The idea, for Illich, rests finally on the imago dei, the image of God in which we have been created, but it continues to inform Western humanism long after this creator God has been rejected and the divine spark extinguished. But, in the age of systems, Illich believed, the boundary defining the human person has been breached and erased. Systems recognize no such boundary. This breach was not made all at once at some arbitrarily chosen point in the early 1980’s. Ages overlap, and, once the idea of a new age is accepted, antecedents and precursors, auguries and portents can be discerned throughout the middle years of the 20th century. All Illich claimed was that for him this new age was sufficiently well established by the early 1980’s that its premises had become obvious and largely irresistible.
Let me take some examples. In 1943 German physicist Erwin Schrödinger lectured in Dublin on the theme, What is life? In his lectures, he supposed, in Illich’s paraphrase “that genetic substance could best be understood as a stable text whose occasional variations had to be interpreted as textual variation.”[32] This was a novel hypothesis at the time, but it was only ten years later that James Watson and Francis Crick revealed the “letters” in which they supposed that the genetic code is written. Around the same time that Schrödinger was lecturing in Dublin, Roland Jakobson, a Russian émigré linguist, working in the United States, “cracked the atom of linguistics, the phoneme.”[33] The phoneme, as the basic sound unit of speech, had been taken as irreducible, but Jakobson argued that it was an effect of an underlying set of binary contrasts and not a thing in itself at all. “A phonetic system must therefore be analyzed,” anthropologist Adam Kuper writes, “as a…system of relationships rather than as a series of individual sounds.” Jakobson’s finding was a “revelation” to Claude Lévi Strauss and many other “structuralist” thinkers in his wake. Not only was language becoming a metaphor for a bio-chemical code, as with Schrödinger, it was itself decomposing, in the hands of structural linguistics, into a set of patterns or relationships. Language, Illich had argued, was an effect of the alphabet, text a consequence of the clarification of the manuscript page in the 12th century. Now something new was happening. Language, in the older sense of something stable, privileged, and unique, was disappearing. When germ plasm can compose a text with no author, and Levi-Strauss can stretch linguistic analysis into an account of all the “elementary structures” of society, language has dissolved into code. And this was what Illich claimed had happened: in place of language we have “a communications medium” or an “information process.”
Speech and writing have become instances of something more general. The embodied word, capable of expressing a personal intention, has lost its contour, its defining boundary has been blurred. Text is now written everywhere – in the genome, in the kinship structure of Bororo society, in the computer’s binary code. Literacies abound, as “print literacy” is joined by “computer literacy,” “media literacy,” “cultural literacy” etc. “Intertextuality” links text to text in a blur of interpenetrating tropes. Language is naturalized and deprived of its unique relationship to personality. This deprivation is summed up in the word “meme.” Coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, it’s a term that imitates the word gene, and implies that processes analogous to natural selection determine how ideas and expressions spread within a culture. It is no longer clear whether we use language, or language uses us.
The fate of language, as a modern certainty that had lost its definition, privilege and limit, was an instance of something Illich saw happening across the board. When he revisited his Medical Nemesis a decade after it was published, he pointed to a similar process of “systemization.”[34] He had assumed, he said, a certain agency and a certain autonomy on the part of both doctors and patients, which had in the meanwhile disappeared. Medical Nemesis had begun with the bold statement that, “The medical establishment has become major threat to health.” A decade later Illich claimed that the concepts which gave that sentence its power and its purchase had dissolved. There was no meaningful “medical establishment,” since doctors had become mere technicians – “adjuncts,” he said – in the administration of treatments based entirely on system parameters and system protocols. “Health” had become equally vast and indistinct – its obsessive pursuit now itself a “threat to health” in the older sense of the term. Patients had ceased to be persons and become a collage of risks and probabilities. This amounted, Illich claimed, not just to a loss of personhood, but to a loss of embodiment. A simple example is the role that risk now plays both in medicine and in everyday life. Risk is “disembodying,” Illich argues, because it invites people to think of themselves in purely mathematical terms as items of population. “When I think of risk,” he says. “[I] place…myself… into a base population for which certain events, future events, can be calculated.”[35] The subject of risk, in other words, is not the individual person but the general class to which he or she belongs. The unique irreplaceable one is supplanted by an abstract. Pursued beyond a certain intensity, this “self-algorithmization” leads to disembodiment. I abandon “the mysterious historicity” of my particular life in favour of the general life, the life that can be opened, enumerated and managed.[36] Medical Nemesis had still harboured the obscure hope that medicine could be recalled to its proper vocation as a moral undertaking in which the relationship between physician and patient was the crux. Now he saw that this personal dimension had been permanently and decisively erased.
The figure within which the Age of Systems coheres for Illich is life. Illich’s engagement with this theme began in the mid-80’s when he was approached after a lecture in Macon, Georgia by a man who introduced himself as “Will Campbell, who has to ask you for a great favor.”[37] Illich recognized the name. Campbell had been a close associate of Martin Luther King’s – the only white person present at the founding of Southern Christian Leadership Conference – and Illich was so impressed that he agreed to the favour without even asking what it was. “Command and I will obey,” he recalls himself saying in a memoir of this meeting. The favour turned out to be an address to an ecumenical meeting Campbell would assemble on the subject of life, a subject Campbell told Illich which is “tearing our churches apart.” Campbell mentioned abortion, ecology, nuclear disarmament, and capital punishment as life-related issues on which Christians were at each other’s throats.
The meeting took place within the year. The atmosphere was tense – so tense that a representative of the Catholic Bishop’s Conference who was present approached Illich before his speech and suggested that he begin with a mollifying prayer. Illich began instead with a curse – an improvised anathema in which he solemnly repeated the phrase “To Hell with Life” three times. “Life,” he said, “is the most powerful idol the Church has had to face in the course of her history.”[38] I found this idea absolutely galvanizing when I encountered it, a few years later, in the text of a lecture Illich had given to a congress of the Lutheran Church in Chicago in 1989, but it was not an idea which Illich ever succeed in conveying to more than a handful of his co-religionists.[39] Mostly he met blank incomprehension, as I discovered for myself, when I asked him to do an interview with me for Ideas on the themes of his Chicago talk. The transcript of this interview became the last chapter of my book Ivan Illich in Conversation, but, when it was broadcast on Ideas as “Life As Idol” in 1992, it landed with a very dull thud, occasioning less reaction, I think it’s fair to say, than any other program I ever broadcast on Ideas. It was as if I had farted, and everyone was politely pretending that I hadn’t. What I had thought was a dramatic, and perhaps somewhat scandalous claim, passed without comment. Illich had the same reaction when he lectured on the subject in Germany and the United States. “In neither place,” he told me, “did I get the impression that one person understood what I was speaking about.”[40] Illich had thought he was pointing to an epochal crisis for Christian faith – “the most powerful idol the Church has had to face in her history” – but, in the meanwhile, this new reality had become so obvious, and so utterly taken-for-granted that it could not even break the surface of attention and register as a topic. I will return to the reasons for this – powerfully on display in the current pandemic when the saving of “lives” utterly dwarfs and dominates every other consideration – but first let me try to spell out what Illich wanted to say.
It should be said first that Illich regarded contemporary veneration for life as the corruption of a Christian original. The Gospels assert, in various ways, that Jesus is the Lord of Life, that in him is Life, and that this Life is not known in merely living but is a gift of the Spirit. This usage in his view shaped the mind and soul of Christendom and created the very matrix from which contemporary attitudes have emerged. According to Illich contemporary lives could neither be “saved” nor enhanced – Coke adds life is a famous instance – were it not for this deep and largely unconscious cultural preformation. That argument is beyond my scope here but must be acknowledged, since it is an open question to what extent Illich’s view is determined by his sense that ascribing divinity to mere life is a blasphemy. His argument was that it is a blasphemy, whatever the blasphemer may believe, because it misattributes and misplaces divinity. Illich knew that faith was not his to confer or withhold and never presumed its presence in his audiences or among his readers. “Recourse to faith provides an escape for those who believe,” he wrote in Medical Nemesis, “but it cannot be the foundation for an ethical imperative, because faith is either there or it’s not there; if it’s absent, the faithful cannot blame the infidel.”[41] He spoke of blasphemy “as a historian and not as a theologian.”[42] And “as a historian” what he claimed was that the life that is reverently spoken of in various contemporary discourses has a secret and unacknowledged tap root in the “life more abundant” that was offered on the Cross.[43]
What Illich wanted to point out was that life, in recent times, had ceased to be a quality or attribute and become rather a substance or stuff, able to be possessed, managed and manipulated in a new way. Life had become, as one now says, a thing – “an essential referent” in the discourses of law, medicine, politics and ethics. An egregious example, in the field of law, is the so-called “wrongful life” suit: an action, now permitted in four U.S. states, in which a disabled person can sue a parent on the grounds that the plaintiff’s life should have been prevented.[44] The administration and surveillance that ought to have been carried out in cases where life is “wrongfully” given is also implied in the no-longer-remarkable terms “human resources” and “manpower” – each suggests manageable quanta of life. The same quantification is now a reflex in news media where lives saved or lost – the death toll – now index newsworthiness. Medicine counts in years of life expectancy. Ecology defends life on earth. In all cases, life is a palpable, measurable and manageable entity – a unit of value. a unit of administration, a unit of political power. Life had been abstracted from persons, Illich thought. The word person describes a unique, storied and bounded destiny; a life is an amorphous instance of something unimaginably general and impossibly indistinct – the ultimate resource.
At the time Illich was writing, life was still a questionable term in the academy – there were “life sciences” but many still doubted that life could ever itself become a scientific object. Modern science had pursued mechanism – the how of things, the world through the lens of “matter in motion.” British Biologists Peter and Jean Medawar summed up this old orthodoxy when they wrote in 1983, “From a strictly scientific point of view, the concept of life makes no sense.”[45] Life, from this “strictly scientific point of view,” was the kind of “occult” factor that science had banished from its explanations. Scientists who tried to bring it back in were tarred as “vitalists.” British biologist Rupert Sheldrake was still given this treatment in 1983, the same year the Medawars wrote, when his book A New Science of Life was denounced in Nature and called, by the journal’s editor Sir John Maddox, ““the best candidate for burning there has been in many years.”[46] But things were changing. Eight years after l’affaire Sheldrake, in 1991, Canadian bio-physicist Robert Rosen published Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin and Fabrication of Life.[47] It took up the very question the Medawars had pronounced, by scientific consensus, nonsensical. Rosen argued that “the machine metaphor” which had dominated biology must be replaced. Addressing the question, what is life?, will generate, he says, a “relational biology” which is unafraid of the previously neglected topics of complexity and internal organization. Rosen’s work was a harbinger of the emergence of what is sometimes called “systems biology” – that is a biology which studies whole systems rather than reducing them to simpler component parts. Complexity, emergence, and self-organization became the new scientific frontiers. “Our vision of nature,” wrote Nobel laureate physical chemist Ilya Prigogine and philosopher Isabelle Stengers, “is undergoing a radical change towards the multiple, the temporal and the complex.”[48]
I was an enthusiastic chronicler of this new scientific turn. Many of the people I have just mentioned, including Ilya Prigogine, Robert Rosen, Rupert Sheldrake, and James Lovelock, were featured in a 1985 Ideas series I did called “Religion and the New Science.”[49] This was another reason why I found Illich’s claim that life was an idol so provoking. His argument was that in the effort to describe what Rosen called “life itself” a crucial collapse had occurred – the boundary between reality and representation had been erased. The Gaia hypothesis was, for him, a similar instance. Speaking, not specifically of Gaia, but more generally of the idea that the world as a whole can be modelled, he says, that this style of ecology involves “thinking in terms of a cybernetic system which, in real time, is both model and reality, a process which observes and defines, regulates and sustains itself. Within this style of thinking, life comes to be equated with the system: it is the abstract fetish that both overshadows and simultaneously constitutes it.”[50] When the cosmos – the whole – is understood as a system, he goes on, it is imagined as something that can be “rationally analyzed and managed.” But, when this abstraction is “romantically identified with life,” it is transformed into “something mysterious” whose weakness evokes pathos and “tender protection.” The procedure by which we slide between these positions, as life’s master and as its reverent servant, is described by Illich as ‘epistemic sentimentality.”[51] This ability to slip unnoticed between a commanding managerial stance – we will defeat the virus - and facile feeling – one life lost is too many – has been a hallmark of public discourse throughout the current pandemic.
Epistemic sentimentality is, I think, a useful and illuminating expression, though it may at first seem pretentious and hard to parse. Why epistemic? Why not just sentimentality? Sentimentality is false or corrupted feeling – feeling whose sympathy for its object is compromised by self-interest. It may be what Milan Kundera calls “the second tear” – the tear aware of itself as “me being moved.”[52] It may be an affectation or dramatization of a state that sustains a pleasant image of myself. Or it may be a way of avoiding action. Always one dwells on the feeling, rather than simply suffering it and passing on. What makes sentimentality epistemic is that it attaches to an object of knowledge – to some certainty whose “objective” features justify and compel the feeling. If it is a sufficiently compelling object, as life is, any perception or awareness of self-interest can be easily and unobtrusively erased from one’s attachment to it. During the pandemic the “saving” of “lives” has been an object so obviously and transcendently good that no question can be entered about it or cost charged against it. This is epistemic sentimentality. Behind it, in the case of life, is our attitude to death, as the ultimate and unspeakable obscenity interfering with out enjoyment of life, but that’s outside my purview in this essay.
What is central to Illich’s analysis of systems is the claim he makes that in many of the discourses of systems the distinction between model and reality has been annulled. When DNA is called “the language of life,” or Robert Rosen mathematically depicts “life itself” as part of his new “relational biology,” one loses awareness that a metaphor is being deployed. Gaia, as a schematic or abstract of the planet, collapses into the goddess without residue. To illustrate, Illich sometimes told the story of a visit he made to the apartment of some graduate students who were studying with him at Penn State, where he taught during the fall term between 1985 and 1995. On the fridge door he found two pictures pasted: one was of the blue planet, floating in space, the other was a microscopic image of a fertilized human egg – macrocosm and microcosm, “the blue disk and the pink disk,” as Illich came to call them. [53] When he showed an interest in these images, one of his hosts described them as “our doorways to the understanding of life.” The term doorway stuck with Illich, and a little reflection made him see in it what historian of religions Mircea Eliade calls a sacrum. As Illich later explained,
A Sacrum describes a particular place in the topology of any culture. It refers to an object, a locality, or a sign which, within that culture, is believed to be… a doorway. I had always thought of it as a threshold, a threshold at which the ultimate appears, that which, within that society, is considered to be true otherness, that which, within a given society, is considered transcendent. For Eliade, a society becomes a conscious unity not just in relation to neighboring societies – we are not you – but also by defining itself in relation to what’s beyond.[54]
What was novel about the sacrums on the fridge door was that they were not conventionally religious signs, objects or places. Indeed, they were not signs at all but. rather, as Illich put it, “emblems for scientific facts” – visions obtained not by faith but by technology. That scientific facts should function as religious symbols suggested to Illich that we have entered “a new stage of religiosity.” [55] (Illich always distinguished religiosity as a broad sensibility from religion as a circumscribed set of formal beliefs.) What was unique about the “doorways” at which Illich’s young interlocutors experienced reverence for life was that they led into a beyond that was not a beyond, a beyond that was only an infinitely extendable here. Like a bridge erected on only one side of a river, or the computer “icon” which opens only into the endless virtuality of cyberspace, these thresholds stood at the edge of a here with no there, “a frontier with no beyond.”[56] What Illich had discovered was a religiosity of pure immanence. He thought it quite unprecedented. The dialectical tension between transcendence and immanence may have been adjusted differently in each religion, but both were always in some way present. Even ostensibly atheist faiths in which there was no personified “master in heaven” recognized a transcendent dimension, constitutionally out-of-reach, and other to what is present and at hand..[57] Here, for the first time, was a world with no correspondent, no complement, no other – a “wombless world,” Illich said, self-enclosed and unbegotten.
Illich asserted, as I quoted earlier, that people around him had begun to conceive of the world as a “a cybernetic system which, in real time is both model and reality, a process which observes and defines regulates and sustains itself.” He was certainly not alone in this claim. Some of his contemporaries went even further. A prominent example is French media theorist Jean Baudrillard with his claim that the world has become a “simulacrum” – an artifice in which reality has been so thoroughly absorbed by its models that now “the map generates the territory.”[58] Models, Baudrillard says, have now become “more real than the real” and exert such a preponderant influence that the ostensibly real itself is shaped in their “magnetic field.”[59] This is extreme. Illich claims only that model and reality have become indistinguishable and exclusive. When people now speak of their systems, it is of themselves that they speak. There is no sense that a model or metaphor is being applied. Nature is an ecosystem; you are an immune system; the CAT-scan of my brain or the angiogram of my heart is me. The element of deprivation in this, for Illich, is that nothing is ever only itself. An account British theologian John Milbank once gave me of the principle of analogy in medieval theology captures well what Illich would also have said. “Nothing that’s created exists in itself,” Milbank said. “It only exists by sharing in the divine reality. So, in that sense, it’s always other to itself. It’s speaking of itself but also of God. By speaking of itself it speaks of something other to itself which is God.”[60] And what applies to our relationship to the “divine reality” applies equally to our relationships to one another. I know myself only in and through others. I move towards myself by moving away from myself. I have my beginning and my end in what is other than me. ‘We are creatures that find our perfection only by establishing a relationship,” Illich says.[61]
Systems are self-contained. Nothing escapes their gravity by definition. Whoever uses them becomes part of them, whoever tries to dissent or depart from them is reincorporated as feedback, whoever claims individual exception or exemption is reminded of the holistic or “systemic” properties that condition them. The pandemic is their perfect embodiment – each one constantly reminded that they are part of a global immune system, responsible for the health of all. What systems thinking produces, in Illich’s view is nothing less than the “disappearance” of the world. A world to be a world must stand apart from us, as other than we are. It must possess a mysterious agency that we cannot fully anticipate or fully understand. Only in this way can it surprise us, and surprise, for Illich, represents the most crucial and most indispensable dimension of existence – its messianic dimension. A system can be known because it is composed of the same ground patterns as I am and is consistent throughout. A world, in the sense I am using the term, can only be very partially known – I cannot know, by assumption or in advance, from which direction or by which means what I need will appear. A world embodies, in infinite variety, otherness – abstract and general logics cannot comprehend it. An understanding of the world as system thus deprives it of its most precious and needful quality. Life, unsurprised, dwindles. “Only smoke remains,” Illich wrote to his friend Hellmut Becker in 1992, “from the world-dwindling we have experienced…Exciting, soul-capturing abstractions have extended themselves over the perception of world and self like plastic pillowcases.”[62]
Gaia, to now return to my theme, conceives the world as system, and that was all Illich needed to know to condemn Lovelock’s theory as an “a-gaia hypothesis… inimical to what earth is.” “Earth,” he says, “is something you have to use all your senses to grasp, to feel. Earth is something that you can smell, that you can taste.”[63] And then he adds the kicker: “I am not living on a planet.” This is an extravagantly and provocatively reactionary touch, given that earth is demonstrably a planet, but presumably he means to say that he will continue to live in a created world, whatever geology and astrophysics may discover about the matter. I have already described how I chafed under Illich’s position, while still seeing something invaluable in it. The question I now want to raise is whether Bruno Latour’s account of the Gaia theory in his Facing Gaia can in any way reconcile Illich and Lovelock and thus, in a larger sense, bring Illich’s radically humanist and incarnational Christianity into conversation with the political ecology that Latour hopes to foster.
FACING GAIA
Bruno Latour is certainly a “well-known” thinker, but, in our intellectually factionalized time, that only means he stands in the top tier of one club while in the neighbouring club he is barely thought of as anything more than a vague reputation. I learned this the hard way in 2007-2008 when I presented an ambitious 24-part radio series on the movement to reconceptualize modern sciences of which I take Latour to be a paragon.[64] Subsequent discussions of the subject, both on Ideas and CBC Radio generally, made me realize that the prevailing image of “Science” as an immaculate and unequivocal oracle, speaking in the mighty voice of Nature, had barely been touched by my work. So, having learned my lesson, let me begin by making a sketch of what I think Latour, with others, has accomplished. Latour’s first book, Laboratory Life (1979), with Steve Woolgar, carried on the task that the pioneering microbiologist Ludwik Fleck had begun in the 1930’s with his book The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Up to the time when Latour and Woolgar wrote, with a few prescient exceptions like Fleck, the history and philosophy of science had been written in a largely theoretical register. It was a field concerned with what scientists thought that they were doing and what they said that they were doing, and not with what close observation might have shown that they were actually doing. “We hadn’t been to look,” was historian Simon Shaffer’s pithy summary of the situation on the ground. [65] Styling themselves as anthropologists in the presence of something radically foreign, rather than as familiars who already know what science is, Latour and Woolgar “went to look,” reporting on the goings on in the neuroscience laboratory of Nobel laureate Roger Guillemin at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California during the sequencing of a previously undescribed neurohormone. What they, and many other similarly motivated anthropologists showed, was, first of all, the sheer artisanal skill involved in laboratory work, and second, the elaborate and contingent character of the many and far-flung networks that are involved in discovering, stabilizing and sustaining a scientific fact.
In later works Latour would spell out what he first began to notice in Guillemin’s laboratory. Particularly important to me was a set of propositions entitled “Irreduction of ‘the Sciences’” with which he concludes his wittily entitled historical case study The Pasteurization of France. [66] By his word “irreduction,” he refused to abridge the “ramshackle” edifices constituting the various sciences, or to boil them down to an essence called Science. (4.3.1) There are sciences, but “Science,” he said bluntly, “does not exist.” It is only “a name pasted on to certain sections of certain networks,” networks that are in themselves “tenuous, fragile and sparse.” (Networks here can refer to institutions, but also to practices, pathways of communication and shared understandings.) They take on the appearance of omnipresence only as an effect of “exaggeration.” (4.2.6). Exaggerations hide the veritable and mundane modes of operation of the various sciences from us “because when a series of locations has been mastered and joined together in a network, it is possible to move from one place to another without noticing the work that links them together.” (4.4.3) Not noticing the work that keeps a network functioning, we are able to suppose that what is contained, supported and extended by the network is in fact universal. “When people say that knowledge is universally true,” says Latour, “we must understand that it is like railroads, which are found everywhere in the world but only to a limited extent. To shift to claiming that locomotives cans move beyond their narrow and expensive rails is another matter.” (4.5.7.1) Sciences can know, in other words, exactly what they are organized, equipped and financed to know – which is a lot but much less than the everything that is promised by abstract and general words – exaggerations – like law, nature, truth etc.
Latour is a thorough-going pragmatist; and, as it has become clearer that he is as much a philosopher as a sociologist, it has been easier to appreciate how much he stands in the formally Pragmatist tradition of William James and John Dewey, as well as in the distinct but related lineage of Alfred North Whitehead. For example, in his Irreduction, he challenges an imaginary interlocutor to prove to him that “this substance which works so well in Paris is equally good in the suburbs of Timbuktu.” Why bother, replies his interlocutor, since a “universal law” is known to obtain. Yes, says Latour but I don’t want to believe it. I want to see it. Ah, says the other, then “just wait until I have built a laboratory, and I’ll prove it to you,” (4.5.7.1). This illustrates the principle that “nothing escapes from a network.” Not all would agree. Perhaps the “substance” works even in places where there are no laboratories to prove it and even where the very concept may be unintelligible. Isn’t the atomic weight of gold always 79 even where no apparatus exists to prove it? (This is Charles Taylor and Hubert Dreyfus’s example in their Retrieving Realism, where their target is Richard Rorty’s claim, more or less identical to Latour’s, that there is no reality independent of our knowledge of it. [67]) But, however this old debate is settled, I find Latour’s attention to the actual practice of science[s] invaluable, and widely applicable. It happened, for instance, that when I was first reading Irreduction, I stepped out for a walk and was passed by a van from a Toronto television station with the word EVERYWHERE emblazoned on its side in bold letters. Television stations also claim knowledge which far exceeds the reach of their vehicles, cameras, and work routines. Though the van was manifestly there in the street beside me and nowhere else, it could claim to be everywhere by virtue of its knowledge. Knowing the universal laws by which news can be identified, the station’s eye was effectively all-seeing, despite the modest appearance and restricted ambit of its rather small van.
Latour went on to spell out the political implication of the revised and more humble view of the sciences which he proposed – first in We Have Never Been Modern (English 1993). There he described what he called the modern “constitution.” The term usually has a political reference, and Latour certainly wanted to retain this reference, while at the same drawing attention to the way in which our knowledge of the world is “constituted” in the first place. This modern knowledge constitution, he said, involved a series of clarifying separations, or “purifications.” The primary division segregated nature from society. In a second move God was set at a safe distance from the world – “crossed-out” as Latour said and denied any active part in the affairs of people or nature. Nature would be the province of the sciences and would speak through them in a clear, indisputable and unconstrained voice, so that the facts on the ground would virtually, as we say, speak for themselves. Society alone would be the province of politics. Latour has many witty pages on the illicit commerce that has always taken place between these two supposedly distinct realms – hence his title, We Have Never Been Modern – but his main point is that this distinction has now been utterly overwhelmed by the hybridization of nature and society. Climate change is a sufficient example. It is neither a social phenomenon with natural causes nor a natural phenomenon with social causes, but a predicament in which the two are inextricably and indistinguishably mixed. Moreover, it is also a result of this pretended separation, since humans could never have taxed nature to the extent we have without the fiction of standing apart from it as subjects facing an object. (This drawing apart of subjects and objects is another of Latour’s modern separations or purifications.)
The modern constitution is now defunct, Latour says, belied by the countless hybridizations of Nature and Society that surround us. But sunk capital and intellectual inertia together sustain its existence. Even critical thought, Latour says, continues to stop and show its passport at the old, approved boundaries. Critique “demystifies” and purifies – it puts things back in their proper categories. Any attempt to make a social phenomenon appear as a natural one is denounced as an illicit “naturalization.” Any incursion of nature on society will be rejected as a limitation on freedom. What is not faced, either among the moderns or the post-moderns, is the fact that the realities that make are world are generated in the intermediate zone – the “metamorphic zone,” Latour says – where nature and society meet and exchange properties, as they are continually networked, mediated and translated into one another. Notable at the moment is the COVID-19 virus, a perfect example of what Latour calls a “hybrid.” It is an entirely natural object, which is also an entirely social object, its physical existence fostered by contemporary socio-technical conditions, it meaning determined in the stew of anxiety and opportunity comprising politics, media and the “health professions.”
My sketch necessarily simplifies and omits, but the next book I want to mention is 2004’s The Politics of Nature (first French edition 1999), an essay on “how to bring the sciences into democracy.” Latour’s argument there was that politics in modernity had been disabled – “render[ed] impotent” – by the creation of an “incontestable nature.”[68] Nature’s authority was expressed through science which brought forward matters of fact, “risk free objects” scrubbed clean of any trace of their artificial origin. Politics was left to bob in the wake of the sciences, responsible for managing the world of opinion, but with no jurisdiction over the scientifically produced creations and discoveries which sprang out of Nature like the armed men, in the old Greek story, who jumped up from the furrows when Cadmus sowed the dragon’s teeth. Science filled the world with hybrids – imbroglios in which humans and non-humans were hopelessly entangled – artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, transformed landscapes and a changing climate – but these new kinds of things were represented in politics only, so to speak, after the fact. Scientists remained the vestal virgins of Nature even as they filled the world with uncanny objects that could have found no place in the cosmograms of earlier societies. Politics belonged to society, science to nature.
Latour’s proposal for “bringing the sciences into democracy” involved recognizing that scientists are the de facto representatives of the various non-humans that they have introduced into society. The modern constitution portrays these non-humans as objects – the only position it has available for whatever is not a speaking human subject – but they are in fact social actors or actants, as Latour sometimes says. The microbes that Pasteur “made public” have had a profound influence on society – the actions taken against them are a primary reason why the human population has now almost reached 8 billion. And, as humans have acted on them, they have re-acted, mutating and adapting and forcing society to adapt in turn. Things that have no voice still speak. The ravaged wetland that once absorbed spring runoff speaks, often without anyone hearing, as a downstream flood. Microbial antibiotic resistance transforms agriculture and health care. But these matters have no political representation, so long as the sciences believe that their standing, authority and integrity rest on their having nothing to do with politics. The difficulty that this poses ought to have been on glaring display during the current pandemic, when manifestly political decisions with profound social consequences have been regularly dressed up as scientific mandates, but no one notices so long as the modern constitution continues to keep any intercourse between science and politics out of sight and out of mind.
Representing non-humans in domains long-defended as exclusively social is a task that turns on the two primary meanings we give to the word represent itself. Representation is first of all a question of knowledge. It speaks of the shape and form we give to things, the way we picture or conceive the things of the world. The modern constitution, according to Latour, provides us with a map that is now profoundly at variance with the territory it supposedly pictures. This discrepancy has been brought into clear relief by science studies. By actually going to look, these new anthropologists of the sciences have shown that the practice of the sciences is quite different than what is claimed by the prevailing myth. According to this cover story science is the servant of nature – the immaculate oracle through which nature makes itself known. This is a misrepresentation and must now change, Latour says, if we are to have any understanding at all of how our world is being made and remade from day to day. But representation has a second sense which refers to the ways in which political assemblies are constituted. This is currently understood as an entirely social matter. The entire biosphere may have been thrown into question, but only humans may deliberate about the matter. This too must change in order to give voice to the many non-humans that now comprise society as surely as we do. How are all the objects – that have turned out to be subjects – to speak? How is their, so far, unaccounted for agency to be recognized? Who speaks for the forests and oceans, glaciers and wetlands, microbes and cloned sheep? Latour’s answer is that the sciences which know them will have to speak for them. But for this to happen the inherently political character of scientific knowledge will first have to be faced. I don’t mean political here in the narrow, prejudicial sense in which the word is taken to refer to knowledge coloured by interest, but in the larger more generous sense in which politics concerns the way in which we make a world together.
What Latour calls science studies goes by various names: science, technology and society; social studies of science; history and philosophy of science. Work done under these various auspices over the last fifty odd years, and in a few cases like Fleck’s earlier, has shown a practice utterly unlike the idealized picture provided by the modern constitution. But this new style of academic study has faced staunch and continuous resistance. The frequently used expression “trust in science” sums up this reaction. The position taken by this resistance movement, baldly stated, is as follows: 1/Democracy, progress, and social concord all rest on science. 2/Without science social existence will degenerate into an always potentially violent war of opinion. 3/Trust in science must therefore be preserved and enhanced at all costs. 4/A view of science as plural, fallible, and political can only undermine this trust and should therefore be rejected. During the 1990’s, “back-to-basics” partisans of trust in science initiated a sub-set of the culture wars that came to be called the science wars, though it was, in fact, little more than a skirmish, and few, in my experience, have ever heard of it. It began when physicist Alan Sokal tricked the journal Social Text into accepting and publishing an article he called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The essay was a satirical pastiche of currently fashionable styles, consisting mostly of artfully contrived but, in the end, only faintly plausible balderdash, but the magazine’s editors fell for it. This then allowed Sokal to make large claims in which he tarred the entire science studies movement with the same brush. A few polemical books followed, one by Sokal himself, with Jean Bricmont, called Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s The Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrel with Science argued in the same vein. A few lectures were cancelled; a few science studies scholars were denied academic posts; and then the whole thing died down. Writing about the affair in 2009, I said optimistically that it looked to me in retrospect like “a last ditch effort to save the credit of an obsolete image of science.” [69] Today I’m not so sure. Too often, during the current pandemic, “science” has been used as a shibboleth to divide the sheep from the goats, the enlightened folks from the “hardcore, anti-mask wackosphere,” as one newspaper columnist recently put it, without much regard at all for legitimately scientific findings.[70] (This columnist, for example, seemed either unaware or uninterested in the fact that no randomized trial has ever shown that masks of the kind currently in use reduce viral transmission.[71])
Facing Gaia - to come at last to the text I want to consider – began with an imagined scene that Latour says had preoccupied him for some time before he wrote his lectures. In this scene, a figure retreats from a frightening apparition, running backwards with her eyes fixed on the feared object, and then, at last, turns around to find that something even more frightening is facing her. (His vision eventually became a dance piece created with Stephanie Ganachaud called The Angel of Geohistory,) Latour understands this haunting image as a parable of the modern condition. The modern constitution was put in place, he says, in order to hold at bay the troubles threatening Europe as a result of the “wars of religion” that followed the Reformation. (Some argue that these were actually wars of state-building under religious guise – notably William Cavanaugh, building on the work of Charles Tilly – but that’s beside my purpose in this writing.[72]) The Christianity that had once united Europe now divided it. War had become endemic and vicious – some of the German lands lost up to half their people during the 30 Years War of the early 16th Century. The program that resulted – Latour’s modern constitution - did three things. First it forced God into retirement – He would continue to reign only ceremonially and without effect as what Latour calls “the crossed-out God.” Second a strong state would be established – a “mortal God, as Hobbes called his Leviathan – able to confine religious passion within private bounds. And, finally, knowledge would be put on the firm and uncontestable footing that we today call science. Modernity broke decisively with the past, and, at the same, time kept its eyes fixed on this past, from which it now believed itself to be utterly different, in order to prevent any resurgence of the dangers lurking there. Meanwhile, new dangers accumulated, unnoticed at first, and unaccounted for, concealed by the constitution which safely segregated nature from society and kept the hybrids with which science and technology were remaking society out of view. Only now have we suddenly turned around and found ourselves, as Latour says, “facing Gaia,” and not only facing her, but also having to deal with her in what is rapidly becoming a seriously bad mood.
This Gaia which now confronts us is nothing like Illich’s imagination of a disembodied and highly cerebral system “inimical to what earth is.” In fact, Latour interprets Lovelock’s Gaia theory in a way almost opposite to Illich’s version. Whether Latour’s interpretation agrees with Lovelock’s own is something I’ll leave moot here. I’ve seen no response from the now 101-year old scientist to Latour’s lectures. But, in any case, it is Latour’s opinion that Lovelock is trying to describe something so new and so different that he often “struggles for language” when expounding his own theory.[73] Lovelock, for example, quite commonly uses the word system with reference to Gaia, but Latour claims that “[Lovelock’s] version of the earth system is anti-systemic.”[74] (What could be closer to the edge of language than an anti-systemic system?) The difficulty, according to Latour, is the temptation to think of Gaia as a superorganism or a superordinate whole, or, in cybernetic language, a commanding steersman. (When Nobert Weiner named the infant science of cybernetics in 1948, he derived the name from the ancient Greek word kybernētēs for the pilot or steersman of a ship.) But Gaia, he says, is an assemblage in which “there are neither parts nor whole.” It is “not an organism. And we cannot apply to it any technological or religious model. It may have an order but it has no hierarchy.” It has “no frame, no goal, no direction.” It is “chaotic” – indeed “more chaotic than either economists or evolutionary biologists are able to imagine.” “There is only one Gaia,” he quotes from Philip Conway’s Back Down to Earth, “but Gaia is not one.”
Gaia, to this way of thinking, is an ensemble without being a whole in the usual sense of a unity which precedes its parts as their organizing principle or transcends them as their coordinator. Perhaps this is what some people mean by a self-organizing system – perhaps it’s what Lovelock is stumbling towards even when he speaks of “the system” in seemingly conventional holistic terms – but Latour prefers to stress all the ways in which Gaia cannot be represented by machine metaphors – even cybernetic ones – or with reference to anthropomorphic divinities – even Gaia, William Golding’s beguiling name, is, in his view something of a Trojan Horse with its belly full of unwanted associations. Lovelock, according to Latour, is trying “to follow the connections without being holistic.” What this amounts to is that Gaia is a network or an assemblage in the sense that Latour has been developing throughout his work, and, with others, in the development of what he and these colleagues have called Actor/Network Theory.[75]
The essential idea is that society is made or composed by patient and persistent acts of assembly. The networks that result last only so long as they are maintained and are comprised always of diverse beings, some human, some not, some animate, some not. Behind a robust and durable scientific fact, for example, stands an astonishing array of actors – from the physical infrastructure of the lab where it was made to the energy grid that powered the lab; from the financial institutions that supplied the money to the administrative machinery that kept the lab afloat; from the knowledge networks that disseminated the finding to the habits of mind that make “matters of fact” intelligible in the first place. But once such a fact enters the world as a “scientific discovery” that has descended on some genius from the “Heaven of Ideas,”[76] this messy background begins to be erased and forgotten. Abstractions displace and disguise the networks. Science explains scientific discovery; Society explains social creation. Latour develops the point at length in his Reassembling the Social where he shows how sociology, instead of explaining how society is made, instead treats “the social” as, in effect, its own cause. “[Sociology] begins where is should end,” he says, “and assumes what it should explain.”[77]
Nature is another such abstraction – an assumed unity which then becomes an explanation for that unity, according to the principle of what A.N. Whitehead called “the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness” – “mistaking the abstract for the concrete…the occasion of great confusion in philosophy.”[78] By this means, nature is endowed with an independent existence – a crucial plank of the modern constitution. Although we live within Nature without distinction from it, and although we constantly mobilize nature in our construction of Society, Nature is given the character, when convenient, of a “disinterested third party,” able to settle disputes and protect the scientists who shelter from the dirty work of politics in Nature’s bosom.[79] Politics is made “subservient to science.” The creative and constructive side of science is disguised as the discovery and disclosure of preexistent laws. Many of the functions of the “crossed-out God” are reinvested in this Nature which stands above and beyond us. A civilization that has already begun to extract and exploit “natural resources” as never before becomes able to hide this rapacity by always reverting to transcendent nature at the crucial moment. “This concept of ‘nature’,” Latour writes, “now appears as a truncated, simplified exaggeratedly moralistic, excessively polemical and prematurely political version of the world.”[80]
Gaia must now replace Nature, according to Latour. For him, Lovelock’s discovery is as momentous as the new image of the heavens disclosed by Galileo’s telescope. Galileo confirmed what Copernicus had demonstrated – the earth moves. Lovelock has shown that the earth is moved – it is not the unchanging object that Galileo “launched…into movement in the infinite universe”[81] but an ever shifting and only partially stabilized collaboration between the elements that compose it. The human impacts constituting the Anthropocene now make this undeniable. What was true all along according to Lovelock – that living things produce their own environment – now stares us in the face when, like Latour’s dancer, we turn around. A living world which we partly comprise and partly make is not an independent nature in which we can find solace, shelter or authority. It is time, Latour argues, for an account of nature that is, at last, “secular.” We must abandon, he says, the “under-animated” law-like clockwork bequeathed us by classical science, but also avoid the compensation of an “over-animated” nature that might result from taking the Gaia metaphor too seriously and succumbing to the post-modern avidity for a new sacred. For him the best word to comprehend “the multiplicity of existents” and “the multiplicity of ways they have of existing” is world – a word we have always used to summarize the whole without subdivision – nature and culture are equally world.
Latour argues that Lovelock’s hypothesis represents a crucial modulation of the theory of evolution. According to the common understanding of Darwin’s theory, Nature “selects” the creatures who will prosper and leave descendants according to their “fitness,” or the degree to which they are adapted to a pre-existing “environment.” This understanding produces what Latour calls the “primal scene” of evolutionary theory - a “bounded organism” living in an “environment” that acts as arbiter of its fitness. But, according to Lovelock, there is no such limit to the organism because it is always and at the same time producing the environment to which it is also subject. The atmosphere, to take the example with which Lovelock began, is not a stable environment but a continuing creation – exhaled by some even as it is being inhaled by others. “We are the atmosphere,” Latour says. The reason why Gaia produces such a critical supplement to the theory of evolution, for him, is that it shows the earth to be a more chaotic, less easily modelled “system” than many had supposed. As a dance in which organism and environment are “tightly coupled,” and one cannot easily “know the dancer from the dance”[82] the invitation to participate speaks louder than the commonly heard desideratum to control, manage or save.
What has brought us face to face with Gaia, according to Latour, is “the new climatic regime” – the accumulating evidence that human activities are appreciably altering earth’s atmosphere. But Latour’s version of what climate science has achieved remains in keeping with both his vision of a world in flux and his view of scientific knowledge as precarious and provisional. It is important to him, first of all, that the picture we now have of a changing climate has not been produced by a “prestigious” science, like, let’s say, particle physics with its multi-billion dollar accelerators, but by a “coalition” of more workaday “earth sciences.” These sciences have made no “earth shaking discovery” but rather have proceeded by “the weaving together of thousands of tiny facts, reworked through modeling into a tissue of proofs that draw their robustness from the multiplicity of data each piece of which remains obviously fragile.”[83] This obvious fragility is important to Latour because he thinks that the challenge that the “climate skeptics” have posed to these individually vulnerable data is salutary and amounts to a “gift” – a “blessing in disguise” as my old aunt used to say. He has argued throughout his career, as we have seen, that a prime reason for the invention of Nature was to depoliticize science. It was under this cover that science was able, again and again, to change the world, without ever having to acknowledge the utterly political character of this intervention. Microbes, artificial fertilizers and atomic bombs could be brought, with immense, unforeseeable political consequences, on to the world stage as if Nature Herself had disclosed and imposed these things through her transparent scientific intermediaries. Many scientists believe, Latour says, that their only integrity, succour and safety lie in Nature. Science, they think, can only retain and deserve its authority so long as this authority is seen to be entirely disinterested and to rest on Nature alone. The result, Latour claims, is that climate scientists, for the most part, engage in political controversy with “their hands tied behind their backs.”[84] “The science,” as one often hears, will speak for itself.
The climate skeptics have no such scruple. Not only have they seized the high ground by claiming the virtue of skepticism – a hallmark of Enlightenment – but they have also fought with the unrestrained polemical vigour that the scientists have denied themselves. This is what Latour calls their gift – they have shown the sciences how to fight. Latour has long argued that the sciences must stop hiding behind Nature and enter the political fray – they must come “into democracy,” as he said in The Politics of Nature. Now with the end of God-haunted Nature, or at least with its pluralization, “politics can begin again,”[85] and the sciences must take part. Under the modern constitution, science was covertly authorized to change the world while at the same time constituting itself as the authority before which the political, the controversial, the merely human must bow and give way. Science was the great exception by which modernity distinguished itself definitively and forever from all other times, place and peoples. The field of Science Studies, according to Latour, has now shown that science is continuous with other human constructions. Its networks may be unusually long, its effects unusually powerful, but it extends no farther than these networks can carry it. It is not universal, and it is not the voice of a displaced God called Nature. The sciences are therefore obliged to argue their case rather than to claim that it is beneath their dignity as sciences to enter into vulgar contests of opinion. They must stake their claim in the political arena and reveal the grounds on which their claim rests. These grounds, according to Latour, are persuasive and compelling but they are not beyond argument.
Latour has always imagined a new politics, constructed beyond the fictions of Nature and Society, and including all those beings who are now at stake as a result of the “ecological mutation” which modernity has brought about. He calls the parties who will participate in this politics “collectives” in recognition that they are not just societies but worlds in which places, histories, techniques and the many non-human beings a given group mobilizes also play a defining part. These collectives, he insists, each rest on a distinct and different foundation. This is a corollary of never having been modern. Once we abandon universality, and the coordinating role universals like Nature, Society and Science have played in constructing modernity’s uniqueness, we can see that we are not all living in one time or one space or one set of scientific laws. Politics must therefore begin again on the basis of difference. The different “peoples” who will become perceptible once we stop arranging everything along the arrow of time implied by terms like development or modernization will have to introduce themselves to one another and practice the arts of diplomacy at the boundaries that join and divide them. Each people will have to disclose “what supreme authorities convoke them, on what lands they believe they are localized, in what time period they situate themselves and according to what cosmograms – or cosmologies – they have distributed their agencies.”[86]
In trying to define this new politics Latour calls on Carl Schmitt, a German jurist who served the Nazi party during the 1930’s but who has been found indispensable by later political theorists nonetheless. In his book The Concept of the Political (1932), Schmitt supposed that politics is defined by what he called the friend/enemy distinction. For Schmitt if something was true, as for him Christianity was true, a decision was demanded in favour of that truth – a decision which would inevitably reveal enemies as well as friends. According to Schmitt, liberalism had not faced this hard truth, preferring postponement, equivocation and endless indecisive talk. Arguably, it was his preoccupation with these failings that blinded him to the evil of National Socialism, but Latour still feels there is something in Schmitt’s idea, and, using the long spoon enjoined on those who sup with the devil, he tries to extract it. There are real indissoluble differences in the world, Latour says. This is an unavoidable consequences of withdrawing science’s epistemological privilege and dismantling the framework of universality this privilege underwrites. Latour’s “peoples,” each convoked by different gods, appealing to different histories, and living in different times, have no common denominator. What he takes from Schmitt is the idea that there can be no peace without prior recognition of a possible state of war, no friend without an enemy. A decision is demanded of contemporary people – that is the nub of the “new climatic regime” for Latour – but there is no agreement on how to make it or the grounds on which it should be made. At the moment all parties hope to prevail by calling their opponents insulting names. What this epidemic incivility indicates is that they have not in fact recognized genuine enemies – people standing on different moral foundations – but just assumed that the others have somehow stupidly failed to adopt the correct view. Latour’s proposal, if I understand him well, is that the opponent can only become a friend if he/she is first respected as an enemy. (And perhaps the injunction in the Sermon on the Mount to “love” the enemy says the same.[87]). Relinquishing the modern framework allows one to see that differences are real and not just the result of incomplete modernization. And only this acknowledgement can produce the delicate diplomacy that will be required to harmonize these differences.
Latour has long recognized that the modern constitution is a displaced theology. Only with Lovelock’s chaotic and indifferent Gaia, he says, do we reach an account of nature which is “finally secular.”[88] But, in Facing Gaia, he goes much further into theological analysis than he has in the past, summoning to his aid another surprising ally, political philosopher Eric Voegelin. Voegelin argued in his influential book The New Science of Politics (1952) that modernity is a betrayed and transposed Christianity. The book’s argument is that Christianity, in its original form, was too spiritual, too arid, and too other-worldly – in short, too difficult – to ever become a popular religion because most people simply lacked “the spiritual stamina for the heroic adventure of the soul that is Christianity.”[89] And yet it did become a popular religion. It did so, according to Voegelin, by rendering spiritual and ascetic ends into practical techniques and achievable worldly goals. He called this reduced and operationalized Christianity Gnosticism, in recognition of the evil twin that had been there all along, ready to turn spiritual wisdom into practicable knowledge (gnosis). He finds a culmination of this movement in the work of Joachim of Flores (1135-1202), a visionary Italian monk whose writings applied the Trinity to history and declared that, at the beginning of the second Christian millennium, the Age of the Son was about to give way to the Age of the Spirit. (The Age of the Father, corresponding roughly with what Christians call the Old Testament, had preceded the Age of the Son in Joachim’s scheme.) In Voegelin’s terms, “a symbol of faith” had been made into an object of historical experience – a fateful philosophical fallacy in Voegelin’s view because history, being incomplete, can never be an object of experience.[90] The eschaton, the final, or ultimate things, had been mapped onto history. Voegelin calls this “immanentizing the eschaton” – what can properly be grasped only in symbols, because it is inherently transcendent, has been rendered palpable and present. Many revolutions and New Ages will follow, but Joachim’s visions set the pattern by which the end of history was brought within history.
What this means to Latour is that, once the eschaton has been historicized or immanentized, the end is, in a sense, already behind us. As part of history, it has already happened – and therefore we can’t recognize it or react to it intelligently when it suddenly looms ahead of us as vexed Gaia. His Angel of Geohistory dance/parable reenacts this predicament. For the moderns, Latour says, history began to come to an end a long time ago. Modernity is already an “immanentized heaven” and, as such, lacks an “accessible earth.” We may be on the brink of creating an unliveable environment for much of earth’s existing population, but we can’t conceptualize this end because it doesn’t fit the scheme in which the end has already been installed in history as infinite progress. How could we go back?
Latour’s answer, already given thirty years ago, is: abandon the belief that we are or ever have been modern – the belief that we have magically instituted an unending progress – the belief that time can be told in a sequence of which we are the culmination. We must return to the condition which we, in fact, have never left (except in the undeniably powerful and consequential fantasy by which we appeared to bring heaven to earth in the first place.). Once, says Latour, paraphrasing Voegelin, “immanence and transcendence, the passage of time and the time of the end, the terrestrial city and the celestial city, were in a relation of mutual revelation.” Then came what Voegelin calls the fall into Gnosticism. Heaven came to earth; eternity nested in time. Religion, “so fragile, so unsure of itself,”[91] was given more solid footings. We became modern. The perfected society we were making blocked access to the earth. Now we must once again become, in Latour’s word, earth-bound. And this can only be done by first releasing heaven from our grasp and letting it return to its proper place – out of our reach.
“The new climatic regime,” in Latour’s estimate, confronts us with a potential end, but we have brought this situation about by being a civilization whose religion has always preached that time tends inexorably towards its end. We must, therefore, he says, recognize that, “The end times have come but that time is lasting.”[92] A series of similar paradoxes follows. “The end has been reached,” he says, “and it is unreachable.” “We are saved and we are not.” And, finally, “‘The end time has come,’ yes, but it goes on. And this prolongation gives decision the same lacunary, incomplete, fragile, mortal character it had before the end time came. This contradiction must not be overcome.”[93] (my italics). This last sentence, I believe, is a key to the whole work. Heaven and earth, time and eternity stand in opposition – neither can be dissolved in the other without a catastrophic loss of consistency. (This is what Latour means when he says that an “immanentized” heaven destroys access to the earth.). This opposition can be conceived as harmony, complementarity or contradiction. But Western philosophy, since the time of Aristotle, has upheld the principle (or law) of non-contradiction.[94] The reachable cannot be unreachable, whatever ends cannot continue etc. Contradiction must be resolved – absorbed dialectically into a higher unity, circumvented by the scholastic principle, “When you meet a contradiction, make a distinction,” or otherwise ironed out. Latour makes the scandalous suggestion that a contradiction should be recognized as unsurpassable and allowed to stand.
Latour has written in many of his books against what he sometimes has called “totalization.”[95] A limited, compassable, local thing when totalized becomes an infinite, abstract, universal thing with holistic or transcendent properties that saturate its parts. To take a homely example, the little news van that so impressed me by its claim to be “everywhere,” at the same moment that it was passing me in the street, was attempting a totalization. To mistake a network, which can be painstakingly traced out and followed, for a global or universal system that exceeds any grasp is a totalization. In the case I’ve been discussing, Latour is trying to insure that the idea of the end or the time of the end is not deprived of its provisional and unfinished character – its fragility and mortality, he says. The point of Voegelin’s analysis of the Gnostic heresy which infiltrated medieval Christianity is that religious symbols were introduced into history as if they were perceptible and achievable goals – that Age of the Spirit which has ended by ruining earthly existence for so many. The end must haunt us without our ever thinking of a definitive end. William Blake in his descriptive notes on his etching “A Vision of the Last Judgment” says that, “Whenever any Individual Reject Error and Embraces Truth, a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual.” “Vision,” he says, “…is a Representation of what Eternally Exists.”[96] In this way, a last judgment can occur repeatedly. Latour is talking of a recurring end, an end that can guide us, haunt us, instruct us, but which we can never specify or pin down without it turning against us as one more intimidating and discouraging totalization.
Latour has always been hospitable to religion as a mode of experience. Earlier I quoted his counsel against the illusion that religion can ever be “left behind.” Established religions, he says, have long since produced their own “antidote.” Those who think that they have left religion behind instead become prey to its more debased forms and drink its poison without antidote.[97] I first began to suspect that Latour was, and is a Christian writer, though of an extremely subtle and tactful kind, while I was reading The Politics of Nature. I began to hear Gospel accents in statements like, “Weakness, it seems to me, may lead further than strength.”[98] and a little further on, “The smallest can become the largest,” which he backs up by quoting Jesus’ saying, “It was the stone rejected by the builders which became the keystone.”[99] His An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013) makes his openness to religious experience more explicit:
It would not be of much use to say that religious beings are ‘only words,’ since the words in question transport beings that convert, resuscitate and even save persons. Thus they are truly beings; there’s really no reason to doubt this. They come from outside, they grip us, dwell in us; we address them, pray to them, beseech them.
By granting them their own ontological status, we can already advance quite far in our respect for experience. We shall no longer have to deny thousands of years of testimony, we shall no longer need to assert sanctimoniously that all the prophets, all the martyrs, all the exegetes, all the faithful have ‘deceived themselves’ in ‘mistaking’ for real beings what were ‘in fact nothing but’ words or brain waves – representations in any case. Fortunately, investigators no longer have to commit such reductions (not to say such sins!), since we finally benefit from a sufficiently emptied-out universe to make room not only for the invisible bearers of psyches but also for the pathways of alteration – we can even call them networks – that allow the procession of angels to proceed on their way.[100]
Religion here is treated just as the sciences have been treated in earlier writings – as a mode of experience with its own distinct character and its own very specific requirements. There is nothing, he says, “behind religion.” There is no higher court in which religious beings can or should prove themselves to us, no test by which we can ascertain what or who they “really” are. Indeed the heart of religion – as “all testimony agrees” and Scripture again and again attests – is the unending effort to discern what can never be finally or definitively discerned:
All testimony agrees on this point: the appearance of [the] beings [of religion] depends on an interpretation so delicate that one lives constantly at risk and in fear of lying about them; and, in lying, mistaking them for another – for a demon, a sensory illusion, an emotion, a foundation. Fear of committing a category mistake is what keeps the faithful in suspense. Not once in the Scriptures, do we find traces of someone who was called who could say he was sure, really sure, that the beings of the Word were there and that he had really understood what they wanted of him. Except for the sinners. This is even the criterion of truth, the most decisive shibboleth: the faithful tremble at the idea of being mistaken, while infidels do not. Exactly the chiasmus that the transmigration of religion into fundamentalism has lost, replacing it by a differentiation – as impossible as it is absolute – between those who believe and those who do not.[101]
The emphasis on discernment, vigilance and humility here may help to clarify the paradoxes I cited earlier concerning the end which has arrived but which continues, which has been reached but is unreachable etc. The peculiar property of the beings of religion is that they are “ways of speaking.” In religion, he says, language “flows.” It does not “refer.” And this flowing speech must be constantly “renewed,” Latour says, because this “Logos cannot rely on any substance to ensure continuity in being.”[102] Religious beings are, by nature, “intermittent.” and “neither their appearance or their disappearance can be controlled.”
One can neither deceive them nor deflect them nor enter into any sort of transaction with them. What matters to them apparently is that no one ever be exactly assured of their presence: one must go through the process again and again to be confident that one has seen them, sensed them, prayed to them…the initiative comes from them…They are never mistaken about us, even if we constantly risk being mistaken about them; they never take us “for another”, but they invite us to live in another – totally different – way. This is what is called, accurately enough, a “conversion.”[103]
Religion for Latour is a “mode of existence” as are science and politics (though the last is often unjustly scorned by those in the grip of the modern delusion that the truth of science outshines and belittles politics’ grubby transactions.) These three modes must be kept distinct, in Latour’s view, because their virtues become poisons when these modes are confused. To try to extricate them from one another is one of the main purposes of Latour’s lectures. With a proper understanding of religion he hopes to do four things. The first is to expose the illusion that religion can be overcome or “left behind,” which, as we have seen already, only exposes people to more debased religions while depriving them of the interpretive resources already accumulated within established religious traditions. The second is to undo what Jan Assman in his influential book Moses the Egyptian called “the Mosaic distinction,” or the unprecedented idea that appeared first within Judaism that there is one true religion which renders all others false, one true God who invalidates all others. This monotheism, in Latour’s view still haunts modernity as the “crossed-out God” whose properties have been transposed onto Nature and prevents “the peoples” in their religious variety from ever meeting on an equal footing. The third is to allow us to see the sciences for the precious but precarious practices that they are by scrubbing the vestiges of theology from their self-portrait. And finally – the biggest surprise in Facing Gaia for me – he hopes to restore Christianity to its proper vocation.
It was Christianity’s fate, he argues, to misunderstand and misapprehend the Incarnation – the idea that God has taken flesh and become present and available to us in and through one another. What should have been taken as pertaining to this world, as a radically new way of understanding it, instead was taken as indicating another “supernatural” dimension, in which and for which we are “saved.” “The Incarnation,” he writes, “has been changed into a vanishing point far from all flesh, pointing to the disembedded realm of remote spiritual domains.”[104] Christianity, he says was “led astray” as “generations of priests, pastors and preachers…have mistreat[ed] the Holy Gospels in order to add above nature a domain of the supernatural.” The eventual result of this estrangement from what should have been the most earthly of doctrines – the Word made flesh – has been that “the faithful [were made] to disdain the path of the sciences at the very moment when the sciences were showing the path of the earth more clearly than the column of smoke that led the Hebrews into the desert.” (my italics) That the sciences ultimately “show the path of the earth” is an absolutely crucial point here, and one that might easily be overlooked by those who have misread Latour’s radical re-description of science as an expression of enmity rather than of, as I think it is, profound respect.
Latour’s view that Christianity ought to have remained earthbound does not lead him to reject the idea of Creation. Creation might have functioned, he says, as “an “alternative to Nature,” if it had retained the character of an imaginative vision of a living earth. If this had happened, it might have allowed “the power of conversion of the Incarnation [to] extend little by little, I ought to say neighbour by neighbour, to the entire cosmos.” Instead Creation became the prototype of Nature – the inert, obedient, law-like petrification of a mighty will.
As I’ve been stressing, Nature, in Latour’s view, is displaced theology. Gaia, as he understands it, is the overcoming of this outmoded and mistaken theology. Gaia, at last, “offers a secular, worldly, terrestrial figure” – an image of a world instinct with immanent powers, not bound by the dictate of a designer or the predictions of a plan. With Gaia as the image of nature – an image neither over-animated as in paganism nor under-animated as in Christian natural theology – the Incarnation can return to earth. “The dynamic of the Incarnation,” he says, referring to that movement “from neighbor to neighbour” of which he just spoke, “can recapture its momentum in a space freed from the limits of nature.” And this way of thinking, he argues, has been a potential of Christianity all along. In support of this view he quotes the apostle Paul’s statement in his letter to the Romans that the whole creation has been groaning in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.[105] “This shows,” he writes, “that the creation has not been completed, and that it therefore must be completed, step by step, soul by soul, agent by agent.”[106] Gaia rescues Christianity from an abstract God and an abstract nature – that God whom William Blake called Urizen (a pun more perceptible when the name is read aloud as “your reason”):
LO, a Shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! unknown, unprolific,
Self-clos’d, all-repelling. What Demon
Hath form’d this abominable Void,
This soul-shudd’ring Vacuum? Some said 5
It is Urizen. But unknown, abstracted,
Brooding secret, the dark power hid.[107]
ILLICH AND LATOUR
Having now introduced Latour and Illich, let me now take my final step and try to understand what their views say to each other. It is Illich’s contention that systems are inherently totalizing. First, they integrate all their elements in a whole which conditions every part. Second, because of this internal consistency, they eliminate otherness – there are no breaks, discontinuities or inherently unknowable features within the system that can be bridged only by hope, prayer or imagination – the system is all of a piece. And, finally, systems have no outside – all thought or action in relation to a system becomes part of that system – the system continuously transforms transcendence into immanence, outside into inside, absence into presence. So, system, for him, is the ultimate monism – the terminus of what Charles Taylor calls the “direct access society” in which each part is immediate to the whole.[108] People who may not even know their neighbours’ names worry about the planet. The scale on which a human life is even possible is destroyed. “As long as you think of the world as a whole,” Illich says, “the time for human beings is over.”[109] Gaia, in Lovelock’s rendition, signifies this predicament for Illich. It is the system of systems, the summit of the vast architecture of abstractions by which the world – local, individual, incomplete – has been replaced. Latour challenges this view in various ways. First of all, he interprets Lovelock’s Gaia as the emblem of a living world – diverse, inventive, every changing – not as the dictation of a Master Steersman who has slipped without much friction into the place of Nature (which had been the place of God.) Gaia, Latour says, is anti-systemic – a muddle constantly sorting itself out without “frame…goal…[or] direction.” Second, Latour’s sees Gaia as a source of otherness and not its denial. Nature as Gaia is “finally secular.” Being without frame, we can gain no synoptic view of it; being without goal, we cannot confidently predict its future; and being without direction, we can impose no plot or historical narrative on it. It is an “order [without] hierarchy” on which we can impose no “technological or religious model.” This more or less defines otherness, if we take the other, in Illich’s sense, as what we depend on but can’t control, predict or fully understand.
Gaia also generates otherness in a second sense. Gaia as a living, responsive world, deprived finally of the theological echoes that resounded in Nature, generates disagreement. The world that God has given us – first as his creatures and then, in the scientific era, as his surrogates – comes with a set of implicit and sometimes explicit instructions. An emergent, finally secular world which makes itself up as it goes along does not explain itself in the same way. The sciences “show the path of the earth,” Latour says, but they never show it unambiguously or incontestably. That is the very significance of the debates over climate science for Latour. The “coalition of earth sciences” who have made the case for climate change have done so in a way that Latour finds ingenious, admirable and persuasive. But they have been able to do so only by supplementing empirical observations with models built on more questionable assumptions, and this has left weak points in their argument – “obvious fragility,” as Latour says – which opponents have been able to attack and exploit. Latour has called these controversies a gift insofar as they require the sciences to stop posing as the virginal priests of Nature and enter political discussion with all their strengths and weaknesses showing. This idea of Latour’s that, after Nature is secularized and Science defrocked and disaggregated, “politics can begin again” implies fundamental disagreement: the reemergence of peoples whose ways of life rest on different foundations and can no longer be plotted on a single axis measuring their degree of modernization or development. All the gifts and all the liabilities that Illich imputes to the other are in play. There is no system which dissolves differences but rather an anti -system which amplifies them.
The third, final and, for me, most surprising way in which Latour challenges Illich’s account of Gaia as the very paradigm of disembodied systems thinking is by making Gaia, as post-Nature, the key to the very revival of Christianity that Illich himself sought. Latour, as we have seen, sees in the totalized concept of Nature a deprivation of freedom and spontaneity – continuous and continuing creation immobilized within a rigid and reified framework of law and petrified theology. The Incarnation, in this preoccupied and predetermined order, is banished to a supernatural realm – Latour’s “vanishing point far from all flesh” where it exerts a purely “spiritual” leverage on human affairs. Shatter monolithic Nature and return the sciences to their full, fallible humanity, Latour says, and the Incarnation might “recapture its momentum” and resume its proper vocation: to move hand to hand or “neighbor to neighbor” without plan or preordination in an unfinished creation.
It became clear to me reading Facing Gaia and thinking back on earlier works that Latour’s political proposals resemble Illich’s much more closely than I had previously thought. In his Tools for Conviviality (1973) Illich spelled out what he called the “three formidable obstacles” standing in the way of “recovery” – by which he meant a way of life in balance with its surroundings.[110] The first was “the delusion about science” which has removed science from the realm of personal knowledge and turned it into a “spectral production agency” turning out certified knowledge which ultimately overwhelms and paralyzes “the social and political imagination.” People come to think that they are governed by knowledge which is of a different kind than their own – a finished knowledge from which all traces of its fabrication have been erased, like Marx’s “commodity fetish” which takes on “a life of [its] own” as an “autonomous figure” stripped of all vestige of the labour that went into it.[111] Illich wanted to demystify scientific knowledge. This has also been Latour’s purpose. He has offered an account of scientific knowledge production in which everything that goes into producing and sustaining this knowledge remains visible and accountable. He has shown that most scientific facts are not the unmediated disclosures of genius by the product of complex and ingenious craftsmanship. And he has tried to deprive science of its epistemological privilege in order to return it to the common and entirely political world in which we must decide together what to do.
This similarity goes further, I think. Illich wrote Tools for Conviviality in order to restore the balance between what people can do for themselves and what is done for them by their institutions and advanced technologies. He proposed a set of criteria by which tools that people can use for what he called convivial purposes can be distinguished from those tools which, in effect, use people – tools that are too big, too complex, too destructive or too expensive to be controlled. And he insisted that the control of tools was a political decision – not a scientific or a religious one. Latour’s attempt to “bring the sciences into democracy” has had no other purpose. He has believed that the sciences “show the path of the earth” – a point I’ll come to in a minute – but he has also argued that the “modern constitution” has deprived people of exactly the same principle or criterion which Illich was seeking in Tools for Conviviality. By segregating Nature from Society, and science from politics, modernity allowed the unregulated production of what Latour calls hybrids – those uncanny creations of techno-science that fuse nature and society and appear as nobody’s doing. Science discovers nature; politics governs society; but nuclear missiles, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and melting glaciers come out of nowhere, admitted by a secret, unwatched door which the constitution doesn’t recognize. The point of recognizing the florid creativity of science, for Latour, is to be able to regulate it – “to replace,” he says, “the clandestine proliferation of hybrids but their regulated and commonly agreed upon production” in the interests of “moderation” and “slowing down.”[112] This does not seem very different from Illich’s ambition “to find the roof of technological characteristics under which a society wants to live and be happy.”[113] So I think, in summary, that there is broad agreement between Latour and Illich – both on the need to dispel the mists and quieten the choruses of angels around the throne of Science, and on the need to bring techno-science within the purview of politics.
The surprise of Facing Gaia, as I’ve said, was to find Latour so seemingly close to Illich on “the dynamic of the Incarnation.” In the interviews I published after his death as The Rivers North of the Future, Illich sketched a vision of “modernity as an extension of Church history.”[114] He argued that the reformed Church of the second millennium, and then a whole array of modern inheritors, had taken salvation into human hands in order to better manage it. Modernity, he said, could only be fully understood as a corruption or perversion of Christian vocation, whereby a supremely free and unpredictable calling was brought under administration. The alternative which he preached, until formal proceedings against him by the Holy Office made him withdraw from Church service, was de-clericalization of priesthood and de-bureaucratization of mission. Latour’s account of the “beings of religion,” as intermittent and unbiddable, assorts well with Illich’s vision of a reformed church. So does his sense of the Incarnation as a personal encounter and not a theological “vanishing point” far from earthly existence. There are many other congruences. Latour points to the common etymological roots of humility and humus and urges living awareness of this link, so that humility becomes a relation to the earth and not just the placation of an always potentially jealous god. Illich is the author of a “Declaration on Soil” that laments the absence of soil from Western philosophy and praises the bonds which tie us to the earth.[115] Latour praises the critical work of his friend, German philosopher Peter Sloterdyck on what the latter calls spherology – the prevalence in Western iconography of transparent, traversable spheres, tending always to the imagination of a total visibility and total spatialization.[116] Illich speaks of “the long drawn out martyrdom of the image,” as more and more of what cannot be seen was brought to virtual visibility. Both want to disable the myth of progress, deprive time’s arrow of its confident direction, and reestablish the dignity, authority, and fecundity of the past. Both imagine a revived role for religion, once it renounces its claim to worldly authority.
There is also common ground in Illich and Latour’s interpretation of the figure of Gaia. In the concluding chapter of Deschooling Society, in an essay called “The Rise of Epimethean Man,” Illich wrote about Gaia, as follows:
From immemorial time, the Earth Goddess had been worshipped on the slope of Mount Parnassus which was the center and navel of the Earth. There, at Delphi (from delphys, the womb), slept Gaia, the sister of Chaos and Eros. Her son, Python the dragon, guarded her moonlit and dewy dreams, until Apollo, the Sun God, the architect of Troy, rose from the east, slew the dragon, and became the owner of Gaia’s cave. His priests took over her temple. They employed a local maiden, sat her on a tripod over Earth’s smoking navel, and made her drowsy with fumes. Then they rhymed her ecstatic utterances into hexameters of self-fulfilling prophecies. From all over the Peloponnesus men brought their problems to Apollo’s sanctuary. The oracle was consulted on social options, such as measures to be taken to stop a plague or a famine, to choose the right constitution for Sparta or the propitious sites for cities which later became Byzantium and Chalcedon. The never-erring arrow became Apollo’s symbol. Everything about him became purposeful and useful.[117]
According to Illich, when people worshipped Gaia, they “trusted in the delphos of the earth” and in “the interpretation of dreams and images.” When the priests of Apollo took over, instrumental rationality put Gaia’s dreams into service. There was “a transition from a world in which dreams were interpreted to a world in which oracles were made.” Illich supplemented this passage in an interview he recorded with his friend Jean Marie Domenach for French public television in 1972 – an interview that took place in a garden in front of a statue of Pandora, a figure whom Illich took to be derived from Gaia, though in a much reduced status, the Greeks having become by the time Pandora was imagined “moral and misogynous patriarchs. [118] Illich tells Domenach that the myth of Gaia in its original form is “the best story about the corruption of man.” “In today’s world,” he continues, “if we don’t turn back to Pandora/Ge, who lived, and I believe still lives, in her cave at Delphos, if we don’t regain our ability to recognize the dream language she can interpret, we are condemned. The world cannot survive.” This is a very strong statement, but not an isolated one. In Gender Illich wrote about the attenuation that took place in image of Mary during Church history. Mary “shed the aura of myth that had been borrowed from the goddess and the strong theological epithets with which the Church fathers had adorned her [e.g. theotokos, the God-bearer].” She became “a model for ‘woman’…the conscience of genderless man.”[119] These hints at goddess worship and Mariolatry were not developed but they remain evocative.
Illich’s statement to Domenach that human survival depends on our ability to interpret “the dream language” in which the earth speaks to us seems to come particularly close to Latour’s version of Gaia. Dreams are chaotic and unconscious products of the mind. Order and meaning may emerge from this chaos, but dreams in their raw state frequently flout the principles of temporal sequence, hierarchy of significance, identity, and narrative consistency that prevail in the conscious mind. Latour’s Gaia, in a similar way, is beyond the reach of rational understanding. It lacks hierarchy and has neither “frame... goal…[nor] direction.” It possesses “neither parts nor whole” and so cannot be imagined as any sort of super-organism. Unlike Nature which manifested order even when it overawed and overpowered humanity, Gaia is not a fixed or predictable order but more of an on-going improvisation in which one order dissolves kaleidoscopically into another. In both accounts – Illich’s dreaming goddess, Latour’s alarming “intruder” on modernity’s fantasies – human pretensions are punctured. Both preach a return to earth and a rejection of images of humanity as “Atlas, Earth Gardener, Steward [or] Master Engineer” – the expressions are Latour’s who repudiates them because they imply, wrongly, that we are “alone in the command post” but they could as easily be Illich’s.[120] In both cases humility is the key note. Latour wants to revive religion as the spirit that makes us alert and aware that there are things which we “must not neglect.”[121] Illich too feared negligence, telling me once that his motto was “I fear the Lord is passing me by.”[122]
Do all these agreements suggest that Illich would have recanted his critique of the scientific version of Gaia, had he only known of Latour’s interpretation? I doubt it because major differences remain. The first concerns nature. “My roots are in natural law,” Illich once told an interviewer. “I have grown up in that tradition. I just cannot shed the certainty that the norms with which we ought to live correspond to our insight into what we are.”[123] He repeated variations on this statement many times. Once he told me that he understood himself best when he supposed the world to be resting in God’s hand “as you can see on any Romanic or Gothic apse.”[124] He said he was proud to belong to a church that “could still say, “It’s against nature,” even if the Church sometimes trivialized this denunciation by applying it to the wrong objects.[125] He staked much of his argument in Tools for Conviviality on the restoration of “natural” balances and scales. This seems to say clearly enough that the world is a created order from which we can derive norms. Latour, on the other hand, hinges his whole program on the abolition of nature and its replacement by a de-moralized, de-divinized, “finally secular” alternative. The opposition here seems stark, except that each man means something entirely different by Nature. Nature for Latour is an almost entirely malign concept – a concept that replaces an active, inventive world by an inert and passive creature of Law, and that hides both the profuse creativity of science and its political responsibility for its creations behind the myth that politics belongs entirely to a separate domain called Society. Nature, for Illich, is the spontaneous,, living, speaking world bought to its ultimate refinement in the doctrine of contingency in which the world appears as “pure gift,” and every time, place and creature speaks of the overflowing creative spirit that sustains it in existence from moment to moment.[126] These two accounts are not easily compared. But it appears, at first glance, that Illich, rather than opposing Latour, is part of that reanimation of tradition that Latour hopes will occur once the dead hand of the “modern constitution” is lifted. Illich characterizes the transition from the medieval to the modern world as follows: “Things no longer are what they are because they correspond to God’s will but because God has laid into what we now call nature the laws by which they evolve.”[127] The second half of this description, in which God, in effect, disappears into law-like nature, is pretty much identical with Latour’s account of the crossed-out God and Nature-as-automaton. If all we know or need of God is to be found in Nature, then God has become, as Illich’s says, “redundant.” Illich spoke always of the living God – the God with whose will we “correspond” – and, like Pascal contrasting “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” with “the God of the philosophers,” [128] he was always scornful of any merely supposed or deduced God – “To hell with God as a hypothesis,” as he once roundly declared.[129] Latour is interested in what comes after Nature, in its modern sense, Illich is concerned with what is before it.
As I’ve said, Illich more than once declined to discuss Lovelock’s Gaia with me. “Stop it with [the] appeal to science,” he said impatiently on one such occasion. “What the difference between that kind of science and religion is I don’t know.” This summary dismissal of a large swath of contemporary reality is of a piece with many other statements that he made in the last twenty years of his life. When the Dallas Institute for the Humanities invited him, in 1984, to reflect on the artificial lake that the city was then considering creating, he told his auditors that the “recycled toilet flush” with which this sparkling new urban amenity was to be filled could never become “the water of dreams.”[130] His hypothesis was that planning and processing beyond a certain intensity deprives water of its imaginative resonance and leaves behind only H2O. When I asked him later if that ruled out baptism, since the water which Christ “sanctified…to the mystical washing away of sin” was clearly something more than mere H2O, he at first denied it, but later said he was not so sure.[131] “I wonder,” he said, “if God might have to redeem us by fire because we have done away with water.”[132] On another occasion, speaking about the contemporary body as an internalized “ideological construct” rather than a lived experience, he told me that he had come to the conclusion that “when the angel Gabriel told that girl in the town of Nazareth that God wanted to be in her belly, he pointed to a body which has gone from the world in which I live.”[133] Illich had warned in Tools for Conviviality that, if limits were not set to institutional hubris, humanity would find itself “totally enclosed within [its own] artificial creation, with no exit.”[134] He gave many evidences in later life that he thought this total enclosure had occurred and the world had indeed been swallowed up by this new human creation and “disappeared.” This thought has no more poignant index than the claim that the Incarnation has become inaccessible because it pertains to a different body than the iatrogenic “construct” in which most now walk around.
This apocalyptic strain in the later Illich can sometimes obscure the equally significant and equally emphatic non-apocalyptic strain.[135] These elements in his thought are in my opinion complementary, which doesn’t mean that they are not contradictory. The world is made of contradiction. Complementarity is the disposition to acknowledge this character and dance with it, as I believe Illich did. But the unwary reader might easily form the idea that Illich in the first half of his career made a constructive critique of modern institutions with a view to reining them in and reinstituting the human comedy within its proper limits, and then, in the second half, despaired of all reform in an Age of Systems so suffocating that it seemed to point only to the end of the world. It was as a student of Illich trying to come to terms with this complementary contradiction that I rejoiced in Latour’s claim that the time of the end has been reached and is, at the same time, unreachable, and that this contradiction must be endured and sustained, not resolved or overcome. A lot depends here on how religious language is used and understood – the point that Voegelin made long ago when he began to try to disentangle time and eternity, earth and heaven, historical experience and symbols of faith. Illich and Latour are also aligned within this project, but it can be hard to see because of their radically different emphases.
Let me take a single issue in order to try and make this clearer: the status of science. Illich made the overcoming of the “delusion about science” one of the keystones of his early work. When he saw that this delusion was only intensifying in a cybernetic science that could no longer distinguish the world from its models of the world, he seemed to say, more or less, that science is over. (In 1992, we get, for example, “…science in America has become fundable research, and in Germany it’s tasks for which civil service positions can be created. I mean stop it with that appeal to science.”[136]). Latour on the other hand has been admiring of climate science and its painstaking effort to show “the path of the earth.” He has staked everything on a re-vision of the sciences. Only when the sciences are seen in their true light, he says, will politics “begin again.” You might say that he has tried to imagine the sciences as they would be if Illich’s “delusion” did not obtain. These are, I think, complementary positions that can learn from each other.
Illich says: “As long as you think about the world as a whole, the time for human beings is over.” This has been my watchword in the discussion of climate change that is now well into its third decade. The worldwide civilization whose seed was Western modernity is unsustainable. Men like John Ruskin and William Morris knew that in the 19th century. M.K. Gandhi knew it in the 1920’s when he wrote in Young India that that if a society as populous as India ever took to industrialization in the style of Britain “it would strip the world bare like locusts” [137] Fritz Schumacher knew it when he published Small Is Beautiful in 1973. All cultures and civilization that have emphasized reciprocity with some donating source have known it. And all have known that human encroachment isn’t just bad for the biosphere, it also bad for human beings for whom the path to wisdom has always gone through humility (humus) and the observance of due measure and due respect for what we have not made and cannot replace. The climate change discussion, on the other hand, has mostly been about how far the biosphere can safely be pushed. It has been about management, often on a scale that is inherently corrupting to human beings. “Managing planet earth” and “saving the planet” are examples of expressions that evince this corruption – these phrases are uttered frequently and without blush, but they can only imply either tyranny or hubris or both. So there’s a terrible paradox involved: addressing climate change as a question of mitigation and not of repentance reinforces the habits of thought that produce climate change in the first place. We don’t ask: what is good? We ask only: what can we get away with without changing? Illich helped me to recognize this predicament. And since, if we lived as we should, climate change would take care of itself, I didn’t see the need for a specific politics of climate change apart from the more general aim of re-inhabitation, limits to growth etc.
A second point, related to the first, is that knowledge of something as vast and imponderable as “the climate” can never be certain. Given the number of guesstimated assumptions that must go into a model of the climate, it should not be a surprise that these models sometimes misfire. This then leads to conflict and misunderstanding. Claiming too much for science generates a reactionary anti-science faction that admits far too little. What gets lost is any recognition that there are limits to knowledge. What Wendell Berry calls “the way of ignorance” – the habit of acting in the light of all that we do not and cannot know – becomes unthinkable.[138] The failures of scientific management – from Thalidomide to the collapse of the Canadian cod fishery – tend to be forgotten. Perceived ‘anti-science” evokes a credulous “trust in science.” Instead of seeking solid moral grounds on which to stand and on which to act, we pursue the divisive will of the wisp of “scientific” assurance.
Enter Bruno Latour. Instead of claiming that climate science is bullet-proof – rejected only by yahoos, “deplorables,” and deniers – he admits that the science has its frailties and vulnerabilities and he praises “the gift” of the climate skeptics. Instead of asking all to bow unquestioningly to “the science,” he suggests that the sciences must enter the political arena prepared to argue their case on the same terms as everyone else argues, and not as a privileged disclosure from a higher sphere. Instead of portraying Gaia as a unified and intelligible system that might conceivably be subject to management, he portrays it as an improvised and incomprehensibly complex assemblage, with none of the coherence, neat categories and clear lines of authority formerly evident in Nature – the dancer and the dance now indistinguishable.
Latour sees Gaia as grounds for humility, not glorification. It is first of all not one, as Nature is, but an aggregate of diverse agencies engaged in continuous accommodation and adjustment to one another. This provides a basis for a dramatic reduction in human self-importance – we are no longer “alone in the command post” – and the foundation for a new pluralism. This pluralism is of two kinds. First, it enlarges politics to include all the non-humans who are both part of and subject to what was formerly Society. (Oceans and forests belong at the table alongside France and Kazakhstan, as Latour and his friends tried to demonstrate at a “Theater of Negotiations” they staged in 2015, just before the Paris Climate Summit. At this gathering, the usual suspects were joined at the table by “Indigenous Peoples.” “endangered species” and various other natural forms and non-national groups. Territory was defined “not as a two-dimensional segment of a map but as something on which an entity depends for its subsistence, something that can be made explicit or visualized, something that an entity is prepared to defend.”) Second, it accepts humanity itself as incommensurably and irreducibly diverse and no longer to be ranked on a single scale or confined in a single story. This leads to his sense that newly defined peoples, or collectives, must make their allegiances explicit and seek a new modus vivendi through peace-oriented diplomacy.
And this is where Latour again comes so unexpectedly close to Illich. The campaigns Illich conducted between the 1960’s and the early 1980’s – against development, radical monopoly, and the myth of scarcity – all turned ultimately on his view that these things were consequences of the perverse institutionalization of the Gospel in the Latin Christian Church. Freedom was the essence of this Gospel – it is “for freedom,” Paul writes to the Galatians, that “Christ has set us free”[139] – but the very universality of this grant of freedom soon urged an unprecedented sense of mission and a universal institution into which all should be enrolled. Previous societies had stood aloof from “the others” around them. “Only during late antiquity, with the Western European Church,” Illich wrote, “did the alien become someone in need, someone to be brought in. This view of the alien as a burden has become constitutive for Western society; without this universal mission to the world outside, what we call the West could not have come to be.”[140] Behind this sense of universal mission lay the idea that the truth which had been shown in Christ could be possessed, contained, administered and ultimately realized in history so long as all kept their feet on the one path. Illich wanted to break this spell and put an end to the disastrous conflation of the earthly with the heavenly city that lies at the root of Western modernity and the world-wide predicament it has now generated. He wanted those who had been “brought in” to be let out again. This was in the interest of bringing human societies back within human bounds – “the roof under which all can live” – but also in the interest of renewing Christianity. Latour’s aim seems to be just the same. His vision of politics “begun again,” freed from the inhibiting supervision of that “disinterested third party”[141] – God, Science, Nature, Progress, etc. – that stood always above it seems very close to Illich’s attempt to end “the war on subsistence” and create a renaissance of diverse vernacular styles.[142] So does Latour’s vision of “the power of conversion of the Incarnation” pulled back into the human world from its theological ‘vanishing point” and allowed once again to move hand to hand and “neighbour to neighbour.”
Illich relished the role of the man of the past. “I’ve increasingly been certain, as I’ve grown older,” he said, “that it’s good to be very consciously a remainder of the past, one who still survives from another time one through whom roots still go far back, and not necessarily examined roots.”[143] This stance, in a man as superbly attuned to his times as Illich, had its uses. He made the past vividly present for many people. (This is another point in common with Latour whose We Have Never Been Modern argues that we should stop patronizing our ancestors, reorient time’s arrow and supplement progress with regress.) But Illich could also carry this stance to a fault, as I believe he did, when he told me “stop it with that appeal to science” because Jim Lovelock had discovered nothing that religion didn’t already know. Lovelock, I continue to be believe, did discover something – about how our unstable atmosphere is stabilized, about how clouds are made, about how land creatures get the iodine they need, and, ultimately, about the kind of world that we live in – a world that makes itself and will in time re-make itself without us, should we render it uninhabitable for creatures like us.
I cannot, finally, answer the question of whether Illich rejected Lovelock’s findings on theological grounds. Nor have I space in this already overlong essay to examine the theological implications of Lovelock’s hypothesis. I can say that Illich’s claim that a theory of planetary self-regulation is disembodying and “inimical to what earth is” doesn’t say anything about whether the theory can be judged true on the basis of the evidence presented for it. I will leave moot the question of whether a God who holds the world in his hands could conceivably hold a world as indifferent to humanity as the one Lovelock pictures. But what I do want to point out is that Latour has answered many of Illich’s practical objections to the Gaia theory, such as that it is abstract, other-denying, and earth-denying. He has also challenged Illich’s claim that science is over, with a vision of science disaggregated and brought to earth. One of Latour’s reviewers, John Tresch, puts it very succinctly: “Rather than a view from nowhere of a pre-assembled Nature, objectivity can be recognized in the quantity and rich variety of mediations that establish and maintain robust chains of reference. Scientists must foreground the instruments, institutions, and relationships that form the sciences’ lifeblood; they strengthen their power by realistically presenting their limitations.”[144] This is science on the other side of “the delusion about science” that Illich deplored in Tools for Conviviality, but it is still science and still grappling with a predicament concerning that synoptically-perceived “world as a whole” that signalled to Illich that “the time for human beings is over.” All of Illich’s reservations retain their force with me. The question I would like to leave hanging at the end is whether Latour’s revision of Gaia has opened a way forward which respects Illich’s reservations.
A final point: Illich is an anti-idolator, and the idol he singled out for particular attention in his last years was life. Life, in its contemporary meaning, is the work of human hands, something we are constantly constructing – in law – wrongful life – medicine – saving life – commerce – adding life, etc. The idol obscures the true God, and it’s having persuasively borrowed one of the names of God – “I am Life” – makes it, for Illich, “the most dangerous idol the Church had had to face in her history.” His denunciation of Gaia rests on the idea that Gaia is one of the emblems of this idol. Latour, on the other hand, has come to the conclusion that anti-idolatry is an infinite regress and leads to a situation in which endless sterile denunciation gets in the way of constructive work. “When one begins with iconoclasm,” he says in Facing Gaia, “one never ends.”[145] In his Inquiry into Modes of Existence, he expands this thought, “The Golden Calf has no sooner been cast down, than the Tabernacle with its sculpted Cherubim is put up. Polyeucte has just destroyed Zeus’s temple and someone is already erecting an altar on the same spot with the relics of St. Polyeucte.” Each anti-idol becomes a new idol in turn. Latour thinks that iconoclasm, or anti-idolatry, is one of the main tributaries of modern critique and produces in the end a somewhat fanatical spirit. Critique does the work of purification and separation mandated by the modern constitution, but its horror of mixtures hides the “metamorphic zone” in which our world is actually made. His proposal is to substitute what he calls composition for critique, as the engine of intellectual culture. “Critique is past,” Latour says. “We are in such a situation of intellectual ruins, that the question has now become one of composition… Composition means you have to take up all the tasks of assembling disjointed parts, so to speak, from the ground up.”[146]
Their positions seem to be opposite. And yet I think they are, once again, quite close to one another. Illich’s defence of the varieties of subsistence, against prescribed forms of development and modernization, was in many ways a defence of composition – of people’s right and competence to assemble the elements of their lives and livelihoods as they see fit. Latour, for his part, is a formidable critic and anti-idolator – remember his resounding, “There is no such thing as science,” from his Irreduction of the Sciences – but he has taken the plurality of truth and the plurality of religions seriously, and that has made him aware of the tasks of diplomacy, peace-making and negotiation in a way that rules out the endless denunciations by which the true God eternally trounces his rivals. Different emphases obscure complementary positions. In the 1980’s widespread misunderstanding of Illich’s book Gender largely lost him the ear of the social movements of the time. Latour’s Facing Gaia seems to me to re-open a possibility of dialogue. If I am right and there is such an opening then Latour’s “This contradiction must not be overcome” seems to be a promising saying to emblazon over its entrance.
In the following notes, I have abbreviated frequently cited titles of Illich’s as follows:
David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation, House of Anansi, 1992 (IIC)
David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich, Anansi, 2005 (RNF)
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, Harper and Row, 1973 (TC)
Ivan Illich, In the Mirror of the Past, Marion Boyars, 1992 (IMP)
References
