If, in the film's judgment, wind and solar will never actually manage to achieve steep reductions in carbon emissions, what are we to do? Well, un-grow the economy, it would seem, and get rid of most of the humans. How? The film doesn't advocate killing us, per se; rather it relies on that unnerving technocratic phrase, "population control."
As reviewers have questioned: who is to do the controlling? Which populations are to be controlled? The long history of racist eugenic-style sterilization measures sets off alarm bells; and the film apparently shows an appalling obliviousness to these connotations by having a series of exclusively white, predominantly male, "talking heads" argue the film's case for limiting the growth of the human family.
Where, exactly, is this coming from, in 2020? Why is Michael Moore devoting the fourth year of the Trump presidency and the first of humanity's encounter with a new global pandemic to promoting this eery crypto-genocidal canard? Has he plunged off the deep-end into eco-fascism?
(It is no surprise, after all, that the "population control" trope has recently seen a revival in far-right white nationalist circles. As other reviewers of the Moore/Gibbs film have pointed out, it featured prominently in the genocidal rantings of some of the men who committed racially-motivated mass shootings in recent years.)
I propose a simpler explanation, however, than that there has been a total personality change on Moore's part: an explanation rooted, to the contrary, in his existing track record as a pundit and filmmaker.
What do we know about this Michael Moore, after all? What does he do; what has he been doing, in all the films we've seen by him in the last three decades? Well, he picks an issue that is gaining traction on the left. He adopts what he imagines —whether rightly or wrongly—to be the perspective of the leftist and the underdog. And then he throws every argument and polemical device at it that he can think of.... regardless of whether those arguments are fair, or even whether they are compatible with one another.
Thus we have Bowling for Columbine. Gun control is a left-wing issue. Liberals like gun control. Is there any possible form of gun control that might raise civil liberties issues, or lead to over-policing, and thereby come into conflict with other liberal values? The question is not posed; the issue does not arise. It doesn't need to. This movie is about guns, not about all those other issues. Therefore, it just needs to make the strongest, most aggressive case for far-reaching gun control it can think of.
If Moore were making a movie about over-policing or stop-and-frisk (which, at least in some cities, was justified under a policy of "getting guns off the street," as much as it was under the mantle of the justly-maligned "war on drugs"), he'd probably be no less forgetful of the fact that there are gun control issues involved. But he isn't in this case. He's making a movie about guns. And guns are bad. End of story.
Thus we have a film like Fahrenheit 9/11. It is a documentary against war. In some sense, it is taking the side of the underdog against the U.S. military-industrial behemoth. So- the movie is anti-racist and anti-imperialist.
But that also does not prevent Moore from stooping to appeals to xenophobia, when it comes time to cast aspersions on the Bush administration's ties to the Saudi monarchy (a critique that the film does not advance on the basis of the very real human rights objections to the Saudi regime, but on a vague implication that any photograph of Bush talking to Arabs must somehow be sinister).
Is Moore a xenophobe or a bigot? No. If he were making a movie about xenophobia, he'd be equally unrelenting. It's just that here, in this movie, he is trying to make the case against the War in Iraq. And in the service of advancing that polemical agenda, he'll make every possible argument he can think of, to appeal to every possible human motivation to oppose the war—including some of our basest instincts.
And now, in the latest entry in the Moore canon, we have a movie about the Earth. And the Earth, in its relationship to humanity, is the underdog, right? Leftists should therefore take the Earth's side. So, we should make every possible argument that can advance the Earth's claims, and denigrate the human impact on the planet.
Is this anti-human stance compatible with anything else that Moore or the Left care about - with social justice? With anti-racism? Does it make sense alongside progressive priorities like Medicare-for-all, or other robust social programs, which presuppose some level of material abundance (and, therefore, extraction and consumption of natural resources) in order for the goods of this world to be shared widely among all members of society?
No matter; this movie is not about any of those things. Moore has already made his health policy movie, in which he of course made the most one-sided pitch for socialized medicine he could manage.
But we're done with that, for now. We're not talking about healthcare anymore. We're talking about the Earth. And so long as we're talking about the Earth, we are going to be completely pro-nature and anti-human.
I suspect that a very similar psychological dynamic explains all those people—ostensibly on the political left—who were sharing the "we are the virus" meme in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. These were the people one heard at the office saying things like, "I'm thinking this may be the beginning of the winnowing of the human race; the Earth is reasserting itself." (It's a very, "come friendly bombs and fall on Slough," sort of argument: The Earth exhales.)
These same people are also committed to racial justice, social equality, and the welfare state—with its presupposition of mutual abundance—in any other conversation. They just aren't aware of any tension between these various commitments. Because, to their mind, how could there be any contradiction? Aren't they, in fact, simply voicing the most left-wing possible version of the argument in every case? Therefore, all must be in harmony?
These phenomena happen on the left, therefore, not because people are secretly racist and evil—not because they're crypto-alt right ecofascists, that is. It happens because, as Pushkin once wrote in his tale, The Queen of Spades: "Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world." (Keane trans.)
Of course, the problem with the moral world is that it does constantly demand we make room for more than one idea; as seemingly impossible as this is for our finite brains. Even if all our positions are "left-wing," it may turn out—oh perish the thought—that applying our various left wing policy proposals may sometimes come into conflict (or at least, tension) with one another.
Moore and Gibbs are of course right in at least one fundamental respect, after all: fossil fuels are not singularly evil and problematic in a way that no other energy source could possibly be. They are not the only possible power source that poses ecological or human rights challenges.
As much as we like to heuristically divide energy sources into "green"/"renewable" and otherwise, after all, there is no system for powering human activity yet devised that does not in some way consume resources. Solar panels are made using silicon; batteries require lithium; nuclear requires uranium mining. Even wind farms take up land. When imposed on the original occupants of that land without their informed consent, wind energy too is a threat to human rights.
All of these resources are finite and can ultimately be depleted. They also require mining, stripping beaches of sand, etc. in ways that can harm the environment and the human communities who depend upon it. There is some kind of natural limit, therefore, to our human ability to make all our activities endlessly "renewable" or "sustainable."
If nothing else, we are up against the wall of the third law of thermodynamics. We cannot escape the celestial slide toward entropy. (Please note: this does not mean the balance sheet of harms evens out between fossil fuels and renewables -- au contraire, au very very contraire.)
Where the far left goes wrong in making this argument, however, is that there is no human activity or social aspiration that does not in some sense rest upon an economic basis— and thereby poses this same challenge of how to find the energy to power it.
The problem of energy would not vanish if we were to "abolish capitalism." Some societies did abolish capitalism—and kept on mining and stripping the Earth for parts all the same (maybe more so). It is not "greed" alone that motivates the extraction of resources. The sharing of resources that we associate with the good and equalitarian liberal society requires those resources in the first place.
In essence: our desire to live in a world where everyone can enjoy some level of material abundance—enough to furnish what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls a "standard of living adequate for the health and well-being" of all—this, too, has an economic basis. It requires energy, from some source. And no source is going to be utterly pure, posing no moral challenges whatsoever.
I am committed to a human rights framework. This means that I am enough of a residual ideological "hedgehog" to believe that all moral values are ultimately reconcilable with one another. If I were not, I would no longer believe in human rights; because the essence of rights is that they are all absolute moral entitlements. Each one cannot be sacrificed or traded off against some other right, or against the equal rights of others. Therefore, they must all be compatible with one another.
This means I do believe, ultimately, that it is possible to avert further climate catastrophes by converting our economy to a largely wind and solar basis, without forfeiting the material abundance necessary to sustain human nutrition, habitation, health care, etc., and without threatening the principle of free and informed consent that must be a part of any development project—including wind farms and solar facilities.
To arrive at the reconciliation of all these values, however, requires giving weight and consideration to all of them at once, in all contexts. It requires, that is to say, holding more than one idea in one's mind at a time.
It also requires understanding and paying attention to the ways in which a zealous partiality toward any one of these values—to the neglect of the others—poses a threat to human rights. Caring only about the material basis of the welfare state, say, without paying any attention to where that abundance comes from, can lead us to turn a blind eye to the harm to frontline communities from renewable development projects; or to the harm to all humanitỷ—and especially frontline communities once more—from continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Valuing only the importance of preserving sustainability, to exclusion of all other values, meanwhile, risks denying human freedom to make our own choices about reproduction and family life.
And valuing only the claims of "the Earth"—conceived as somehow separate from human society (yet endowed in this view, paradoxically, with a host of anthropomorphized moral rights and moral values)—risks denigrating the claims of all human beings to live a full and flourishing and dignified existence within this planetary ecosystem.
It is not enough to say, oh, well I wasn't talking about the welfare state in this documentary, or in this meme. I've spoken about that elsewhere. I plan to address that later. That makes no sense, if what you are saying about one issue undercuts your position on another.
We have to keep all these priorities in mind at once. And we have to start from a philosophic basis that recognizes that the primary reason to care about the "environment" in the first place is not because it is separate from human or animal life—but because it forms the basis for the survival of both.
The "Earth" does not have rights, in itself. The Earth does not have feelings or moral entitlements or moral commitments. It is equally content to be an uninhabitable ball of molten nothingness as to be a lush green paradise. It was a lifeless husk before we got here. It was indifferent to whether or not human and animal consciousness ever came along to "break earth's sleep at all" (to borrow a line from Wilfred Owen). And it will be indifferent to whether or not we eventually perish. The ones with a stake in the Earth's habitability is us—and our animal kindred.
To sacrifice humanity on the altar of the "Earth," therefore, is a kind of paradox. We cannot sacrifice ourselves to an idea that only has value because we humans endowed it with such. Our purpose, therefore, must be to continually assert the claims of human and animal survival against the limits and challenges set by a morally indifferent universe that is hurtling toward entropic chaos. We must strive to emulate Byron's "Prometheus"—to so love humanity, at last, that we dare the anger of the gods.
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