I published this article at Front Porch Republic to sign off from engaging directly with ecomodernists and ecomodernism around food, energy and ecological futures, the theme of my 2023 book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. The article draws on Naomi Klein’s fascinating book Doppelganger to try to make sense of some of the debates around my book and the weird emergent political world we seem to be entering. It also defines ecomodernism and explains why I find it problematic.
The responses I’ve had to Saying NO… have been mostly positive and appreciative (thanks!), but with some negatives too – inevitably so, especially for a somewhat disputatious book. Few of the negative responses seem to have seriously engaged with the book’s core energetic, ecological and political arguments. Not many have been all that polite either. Honourable exception to Mike Daw on both fronts, though Mike’s response wasn’t really negative.
Anyway, I think I’ve now achieved about as much as I can around the book, and there’s little to be gained by further dwelling on it. Ideally, I’d still like to wrest some plausible energy figures for manufactured food from its proponents. That’s proved a bridge too far to date, but I will continue to press for it.
Also, the personal aggro that’s come my way has prompted me to think a bit about good faith and bad faith engagement in public culture, and some of the grey areas at their margins. That’s what I’m going to write about in this essay, before circling back to the question of modernism and what comes after it – hopefully something that’s both more pro-human and more pro-nature. Since that’s what I hope to focus on in future writing, maybe this essay can work as a bridge.
Writers and readers
In a section of my essay discussing Klein’s thoughts about shadowlands, I wrote:
Modern life rests on many shadowlands that we find ways not to see–destroyed ecosystems, exploited labour, colonial genocides, land expropriations of the past and present, ghost acres, climate change and the ‘storms of our grandchildren,’ ecological holocausts like the Canadian tar sands, social holocausts like the destruction of indigenous people’s lifeways.
A commenter on social media told me they’d stopped reading my essay, with its two references to ‘holocausts’, at this point, castigating me for disrespecting the victims of the Holocaust, and … well, just generally castigating me.
Castigation is the name of the game on that particular platform, so I probably shouldn’t make an issue of this. But it raises interesting questions, so I think I will. I’ll say more in a moment about holocausts, but first I want to discuss the nature of the communicative acts in this exchange.
Goodness knows, few of us these days are short of words barrelling towards us clamouring for our attention, so it’s entirely legitimate for anybody to stop reading anything they no longer wish to read without having to give a reason. It’s slightly odder to write to an author explaining why you lost interest in them, because it suggests that somehow you are still interested in them. Maybe contacting them could be an opening to a discussion that could reignite the interest. But if you contact them in a public forum to tell them about your lack of interest in them, this usually has the form of a status claim – essentially, you’re putting the author down in front of other people and telling them (i.e. both the author and the other people) that the author’s words should be given no credence.
Quite a bit of this kind of thing has come my way in relation to Saying NO… – more than for anything I’ve previously written – which I find interesting. While I want to talk about manufactured food and warn that it’s a poor policy option as a mass food solution at this point in history, others say things of the form “don’t listen to Smaje’s views on the food system – he disrespects the Holocaust!” In my opinion, this is bad faith argumentation.
If I try my best to give such arguments their due – and I’m gritting my teeth here – I suppose I’d say that you can sometimes press the logic of something tangential that someone’s said to reveal a troubling aspect that does bear somehow on the issue at hand. Arguably, I’ve done that myself in relation to ecomodernist arguments about the efficiency of microbial food production, which I’ve suggested involve a logic of enclosure. My opponents might protest, “that’s not fair – that’s not what I’m saying” – just as I would say of some of the accusations levelled at me. If we can then get into a productive conversation about what we are actually saying and try to get to the root of our disagreement, then we’re back in the realm of good faith dialogue.
I’ve found that step into real dialogue hard in debating ecomodernists, and I’m tired of the bad faith, overheated moral outrage and caricaturing.
But where dialogue stops, conflict starts. It doesn’t really matter in relation to an argument with another individual person, and maybe one lesson I could draw from this is to opt for the usually wise course of understatement rather than overstatement in relation to incidental parts of an argument, to avoid alienating potential readers. However, at the individual level I suspect it’s impossible to so purify one’s language that it becomes impossible to offend those who are looking to take offence. And, as I’ll argue in the next section, there are bigger and more consequential structural conflicts in society bubbling up within the dividing lines of my little social media spat. As I see it, ecomodernist positions in this conflict thrive by insisting on understatements of the problems associated with modernism itself which should not be understated.
Modern holocausts
Let me confront directly the controversy at hand – my use of the term ‘holocaust’ in the passage above. The origins of the word lie in ancient ritual sacrifices where everything (holo) was burnt (caust). Not everyone thinks this is an appropriate term to apply to the Nazi genocide against Jews and others in Europe, but it’s become the standard accepted term, capitalized with the definite article – the Holocaust. The uncapitalized term ‘holocaust’ has a generally accepted wider meaning, of mass destruction and killing (‘nuclear holocaust’ for example).
In respect of those standard usages, I don’t think my antagonist has much of a case against me. But as I thought about my word choice in the light of his critique I had a nagging feeling I’d recently read an analysis of holocausts and the Holocaust that had some bearing on the issue. It took me a long time to remember where I’d read it, but eventually I did. It was … er … Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. This doesn’t say a lot for my powers of recall, but I’m trying my best.
Klein has several interesting things to say about the h word, which I’ll briefly summarise here. For starters, she’s supportive of the word ‘holocausts’ in the plural to refer to various genocides, including the genocide of indigenous people in the Americas by European colonisers. And she’s critical of attempts to reserve the word to the Holocaust alone. One dimension of her critique relates to the politics of Israel and Palestine, all too horrifically evident at the moment, which I won’t pursue here. Another is an important critique of European or western modernity.
Her point in essence is that it suits western self-conceptions to regard the Holocaust as a unique and unprecedented event, inexplicable in the context of general social progress in the west, and therefore not to be compared with anything else. She critiques this quite effectively by quoting none other than Adolf Hitler, who professed his influences from colonial powers like the British in using concentration camps, from the Jim Crow laws of the USA, from genocides against indigenous peoples and of the Lebensraum-style ideologies associated with settler colonialism and the American frontier.
Hitler emerges from Klein’s analysis not as “the civilized, democratic west’s evil “other” but its shadow, its doppelganger” representing an exterminatory mindset at the core of European thought (p.268). She quotes Sven Lindqvist: “Auschwitz was the modern industrial application of a policy of extermination on which European world domination had long since rested” (p.271), and she quotes contemporary Black intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois and Aimé Césaire who argued that the main distinguishing feature of the Holocaust was that it took techniques long practiced by Europeans against non-European peoples and applied them on home turf.
No doubt these views are debatable. My main point is that there is a debate to be had about them, which renders suspect attempts to belittle the use of plural ‘holocausts’ as morally compromised. Frankly, it doesn’t sit well with me if settler-descended residents of Turtle Island make an issue of the supposed disrespect involved in referring to its colonial genocides as holocausts. Nor, as I argued in my doppelganger essay, does it sit well with me when critics of organic farming or agrarian localism make an issue of the Blut und Boden associations with far-right ideology that characterized some of their early twentieth century pioneers without noting the pervasive biopolitics of ‘racial improvement’, ‘social hygiene’ and what have you across the entire political spectrum at that time, including among socialists and proponents of urbanism.
A kind of mass, organised violence against people and nature shadows the entire European modernist ideology. It burst forth in the Holocaust, and in other holocausts. It’s one reason I’m not persuaded that technical upgrades like renewable energy or microbial manufactured food are going to make much difference in themselves to the outcome of the modernist project, because they don’t challenge – and easily compound – its generative violence. A deeper cultural renewal is necessary.
(Incidentally, this theme took me back to Zygmunt Bauman’s classic Modernity and the Holocaust where he argued: “To understand how that astounding moral blindness was possible, it is helpful to think … how it is possible that the ‘fall in commodity prices’ may be universally welcomed as good news while ‘starvation of African children’ is equally universally, and sincerely, lamented”. This has some bearing on my previous post).
Another aspect of modernist violence is its recourse to quantification and bureaucracy. The creation of unambiguous “them’s the rules” binaries, all the counting, measuring and record-keeping, the Nuremberg Laws – exactly how Jewish do you have to be before you’re expelled from citizenship and safety? – are a kind of doppelganger of the scientific method and ‘scientific management’ nestling at the heart of the modern centralised state’s sovereign power to decide what’s what. We’d do well to remember this whenever we make the case for wider, finer or more discriminatory quantitative precision as a social practice.
Attending to the sacred
When I mentioned to a family member the drift of my thinking closer to Christianity in relation to my increasing interest in cultural traditions and the sacred, she suggested that if I really wanted to get back to the root I should embrace the Judaism of the great-great-great grandfather from whom my surname derives.
A throwaway remark, but it struck me as interesting how easy it is to slip into the notion of a deep authenticity associated with Jewishness (which anti-Semitic thought readily inverts into alienness, degeneration and all the rest). My turn toward Christianity, such as it is, isn’t about family, but wider culture, and in any case my Christian great-great-great grandfathers are no more nor less authentic than my Jewish one.
I think there are some tremendously difficult balances to strike in the changing world that’s upon us. The need for authenticity against the inevitable cosplaying instituted across all walks of life by capitalist modernism, without dangerously elevating the true and pure against the hybrid and mixed. The need for new cultures of local food and place in an era of mass displacement. The need for new orientations to the sacred to overcome the profane violence of capitalist value-extraction, yet without instituting their own forms of sacred violence. The need for new traditions whose constraints liberate people rather than yoking them to the repressive ideals of a dominant social group. And so on.
This is something I want to turn to in future writing. For now, I’ll just reiterate that a part of that project involves attending to the sacred – a point I also remarked in Saying NO… to the predictable scorn of my (eco)modernist antagonists. In due course, I’ll want to specify what attending to the sacred means in more detail, although to a considerable degree it remains unspecifiable, and definitely unquantifiable. Because some things just aren’t quantifiable, while others certainly are (did I mention that I’d still like those bacterial protein energy figures from the ecomodernists?)
I’ve been told that the name of generations further back than my great-great-great grandfather, Shmaya Smaaje-halevi, suggests that my ancestors were Levites and possibly temple attendants. I kind of like that as a metaphor. Attending to the sacred. But hopefully not gatekeeping it too much, nor taking it upon myself to determine who’s barred from entry. This is the formidable challenge of our times – to create limits and localism while not creating arbitrary rules of social exclusion.
It’s not hard to see how new versions of Nazism may arise in the future in the context of the developing meta-crisis. Centralised states directed by ultra-nationalist, nativist parties oriented against enemies from within and without, allying with farmers and landowners large and small, and scornful of fastidious and highfaluting ‘metropolitan’ opinion. I don’t think the best safeguard against that future is endlessly dismissing farmers, ruralism and localism while promoting clean energy and ‘clean food’ technofixes that are clearly not going to buy us out of trouble. Nor to imply that the Holocaust was a unique aberration whose signature themes can’t still be read in modernism’s ongoing script.
New reading currently:
Keith Johnstone Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre.
Tania Murray Li. Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier.
Andrew Dana Hudson. Our Shared Storm.
Gabor Maté. Scattered Minds: the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder.
Patrick Joyce. Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World.
A weirdly eclectic mix you might think. But no … all laser-focused on my next emerging project!
