The Dangerous Honesty we Can No Longer Avoid – by John Foster

Guest article by John Foster, University of Lancaster, UK, and author of After Sustainability.

Note from Jem: In previous essays, I have criticized what I regard as the authoritarian sentiments and imaginations of some environmentalists. I have articulated an approach that focuses on freeing us from the manipulative and exploitative systems that accelerate environmental destruction. British Academic John Foster is one intellectual who I have debated on these topics. He penned a reply to my recent essay, and I am sharing it here to encourage dialogue about the future of environmental politics in a fracturing world. Over to John…

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There is a peculiar challenge in debating how a society should prepare for its own possible collapse. The usual rules of political argument – the cut and thrust, the simplification of an opponent’s position into a convenient label – begin to feel not just unhelpful but actively dishonest. When the stakes are this high, the window for meaningful action this narrow, and the situation so unprecedented, we owe each other something more than polemic. We need to accept that we can’t know what might work to reduce harm and give future generations of humans, and other species, a better chance. 

I have been reminded of this forcefully after reading a new essay on ‘eco-authoritarianism’ from my sometime sparring partner, the author of *Breaking Together*. Our starting points, I now realise, are almost identical. We both accept the difficult honesty that our current systems of governance are wholly inadequate to the task of managing any kind of transition to elusive sustainability. Industrial consumer society, as his book lays out in compelling detail, is already far advanced on a path to collapse. And the conventional policy responses – the endless committees, the timorous obfuscation, the short-termism – are themselves forms of what I have called “implicatory denial”: ways of carrying on as if the ground were not shifting beneath our feet. (See my After Sustainability published by Routledge in 2015.)

From this shared foundation, however, we have arrived at strikingly different conclusions. Professor Bendell has developed what might be called an eco-libertarian vision, rooted in local resilience and the cultivation of calm, creativity, and even joy, amid crisis. I, meanwhile, have been exploring what I term “ecological epistocracy”: the rule of the climate-intelligent. And it is here that the real conversation needs to begin.

Let me clear up one misunderstanding immediately. In his essay responding to my earlier critique, he labels my position “authoritarianism” and appears to assume this means a centralised tyranny in which a subjugated population is denied all voice. I do not regard that as being the necessary implication of my view of a ‘vanguard elite’ taking power in a country. Consider citizens’ assemblies – those carefully selected groups of ordinary people who deliberate on complex issues. I see a key role for them in a society that was rescued from the current economic and political systems that set us towards collective destruction. Political theorists usually call such assemblies as exercises in deliberative democracy. But one could just as plausibly describe them as decentralised epistocracy. They foster, develop and focus the application of climate intelligence to specific local contexts.

An epistocratic central government – one itself directed by those who grasp the realities of climate and ecological breakdown – would need to rely heavily on such assemblies. It would set the basic parameters: the legal framework, the carbon budgets, the reshaping of land ownership, the income support systems. But within those parameters, local communities could enjoy genuine autonomy to develop viable living arrangements. That would not be tyranny; it would be a radical redistribution of authority, enabled by a central power that finally has the courage to stop pretending.

The crunch question is whether such a transformation could ever emerge from our present system of head-counting parliamentary democracy. Can we really imagine a system defined by short-termism, vested interests and corporate lobbying voluntarily resigning its authority to local citizens’ assemblies? The environmental campaign group, Extinction Rebellion, in its first flush of optimism, believed it might. I am less sanguine. What we face is a crisis whose true nature is only available to intelligence. Those who cannot deal in statistical realities and projected risks experience adverse weather and degraded surroundings, but they do not experience climate and ecological emergency as such. The hopeful reaction to this unfolding catastrophe will therefore inevitably assemble a constituency of the intelligent – not just with unprecedented responsibilities, but with unprecedented forms of collaboration and coherence to match.

This brings me to a more theoretical objection, and one I take seriously. Bendell argues that knowledge is always provisional and socially contingent, and yet an epistocracy is likely to become wedded to some mainstream scientific paradigm – for instance, a carbon-centric rather than a truly ecological view of the problem of climate change – and thus risks doing more harm than good through its very “knowledgeability”.

My response is that epistocracy, being the rule of those who know, will be the rule of those who know *inter alia* that knowledge is provisional. A genuinely climate-intelligent leadership would always allow for the emergent, for the insights that arise from local communities grappling with on-the-ground ecological loss. It would be a mistake to imagine epistocracy as a kind of technocratic centralism. Properly conceived, it would be leavened by citizen science, by local knowledge, by the wisdom that emerges from people forced to adapt. I realise that some advocates of epistocracy might not have an advanced understanding of knowledgeability nor put in place processes to avoid technocratic centralism. However, that should not stop us articulating the right kind of ecological epistocracy. Bendell’s challenge here has helped me to do just that. 

Underlying all this is a presupposition so fundamental that I realise I have not stated it clearly enough. Any form of epistocratic rule that springs from this emergency would have to be something so novel that past forms of governance – including those fairly labelled authoritarian – would not necessarily provide helpful clues to its nature. This is an unprecedented crisis, and it demands unprecedented responses. Therefore my response to Bendell’s question of where there are any past successes of authoritarian approaches on environmental outcomes, is that we need to imagine something new without historical precedent. 

His other questions – about how the military and police would need to be onside, and the risk of abuse – point to the kinds of danger that must be run with any genuine process of emergence. Yes, different epistocratic regimes might pursue differing national priorities than ecological ones. But if the rationale was confronting the global climate and ecological crisis, they would share an overriding common theme. Yes, they would need the military and the police as the final security for their authority – but so already do all democratic governments. And as to the old argument that such regimes might turn into something monstrous, one can only note that environmental epistocracy properly conceived, in the ways I am now pointing to, seems considerably less likely to target minorities than do some right-wing political forces that our current obsession with electoral majorities might soon elevate into government even in liberal-democratic Britain.

We are dealing, in all this, with possibilities that must be recognised as open, with attendant real dangers. There are no risk-free options in what is now, inescapably, a tragic world. Not even the option of trying to cultivate one’s garden in a biospheric storm seems entirely risk-free. In fact, it seems to me liable to prove peculiarly self-defeating in anything but the short term.

It is here where I think Bendell and I might reach the deepest divergence. His case for eco-libertarianism rests importantly on the thought that people in the West and North are caught up in industrial consumer society because they are corralled into it by what he variously calls the money-power, elites, and Imperial Modernity. This characterisation can over claim the influence of powerful processes in ways that permit the dismissing of my claim that consumerism is now, instead, a profoundly addictive social phenomenon. Yes, seeing the majority as addicted can no doubt serve, in some people, as a kind of psychological compensation for frustrated agency. But that does not mean the majority are not addicted, nor that there are not good grounds in the nature of life, work, value and meaning in modern societies for seeing them thus.

This, too, is a topic where ongoing dialogue might help. And that dialogue is needed now more than ever. The usual venues for such exchange have, in my view, failed. One organisation on which I relied until quite recently, and which published an exchange on these issues between Bendall and myself three years ago (see Averting climate catastrophe – can democracy cut it?), currently lacks the focus on intellectual debate to host this ongoing conversation. Perhaps that reflects how mainstream British environmentalism is nervously wedded to the story of hope for a democratic transformation to an environmentally sustainable society. Although I understand and sympathise with their wish to succeed electorally, I know that this topic will still be here after they fail to prevent the ongoing disruption, which stems from very profound dislocations and will get worse for decades. Therefore, I am pleased that Bendell chose to accept my proposal of publishing this reply to his essay, as he broadens outputs within the Metacrisis Initiative. 

We owe each other, at this moment, something more than the usual cut and thrust over differing ideas. We owe each other the difficult work of thinking together, in public, about how to govern in an age of collapse. By showing that we can have robust disagreements, yet explore them together, I hope we can invite others to do the same.

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Note from Jem: I will re-engage this topic in the coming months, especially the matter of how people’s assemblies can be enabling of both a smarter and more direct democracy in an era of metacrisis and collapse. If you are interested in such matters, you are welcome to join us discussing them at times in the Metacrisis Initiative…