Educational Philosophy and Post-Apocalyptical Survival (Educational Philosophy and Theory: Editor’s Choice) [1 ed.] 1032592648, 9781032592640

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Educational Philosophy and Theory: Editor’s Choice

EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND POST-APOCALYPTICAL SURVIVAL AN EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY READER VOLUME XIV Edited by Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley

Educational Philosophy and Post-Apocalyptical Survival

This collection concerns educational philosophy and post-apocalyptical survival. This 14th volume in the Editor’s Choice series provides insights into the philosophy of education as it relates to the concepts of civilizational collapse, discourses of decline, educating for survival amid climate emergency, cultural apocalypse and the pandemic. It is based on a series of editorials and articles published in the Educational Philosophy and Theory journal through its 55-year history. The articles, written by Editor Michael Peters and colleagues, explore the concept of global apocalypse from the educational philosophy lens. It will be of interest to scholars in philosophy of education and anyone who is working in the field of post-apocalyptic studies. Michael A. Peters is Distinguished Professor of Education at Beijing Normal University and Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois. He is the Executive Editor of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory. His interests are in education, philosophy and social policy, and he is the author of over 100 books, including The Chinese Dream: Educating the Future (2019), Wittgenstein, Education and Rationality (2020) and Wittgenstein: Antifoundationalism, Technoscience and Education (2020). Tina Besley is Distinguished Professor at the Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University. She is the Founding President of the Association for Visual Pedagogies, Past President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia and honoured as a Fellow of both learned societies. She has published over 30 books and monographs and numerous journal articles. Currently, she is Editor and Project Manager of PESA Agora and Associate Editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory and the Beijing International Review of Education.

Educational Philosophy and Theory: Editor’s Choice

Series editors: Michael A. Peters, Beijing Normal University, China

The EPAT Editor’s Choice series comprises innovative and influential articles drawn from the Educational Philosophy and Theory journal archives, spanning 46 volumes, from 1969. Each volume represents a selection of important articles that respond to and focus on a particular theme, celebrating and emphasizing the heritage and history of the work, as well as the cutting edge contemporary contributions available. The series will create a rich vertical collection across five decades of seminal scholarship, contextualizing and elevating specific themes, scholars and their work. The EPAT Editor, Michael A. Peters, introduces each volume, the theme, and the work selected within that volume. Titles in the series include: From Radical Marxism to Knowledge Socialism An Educational Philosophy and Theory Economic and Liberal Studies Reader, Volume XI Edited by Michael A. Peters and Liz Jackson Marxism, Neoliberalism, and Intelligent Capitalism An Educational Philosophy and Theory Economic and Liberal Studies Reader, Volume XII Edited by Liz Jackson and Michael A. Peters Race and Racism in Education An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader Volume XIII Edited by Liz Jackson and Michael A. Peters Educational Philosophy and Post-Apocalyptical Survival An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader Volume XIV Edited by Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley For more information about the series, please visit www.routledge.com/Educational-Philosophy-andTheory-Editors-Choice/book-series/EPAT

Educational Philosophy and Post-Apocalyptical Survival

An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader Volume XIV

Edited by Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781032592640 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032592664 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003453895 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895 Typeset in Galliard by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

List of contributors I ntroduction: Global apocalypse: Educational philosophy and post-apocalyptic survival

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1

MICHAEL A. PETERS AND TINA BESLEY

1 Western civilization 101

11

MICHAEL A. PETERS

2 Civilizational collapse, eschatological narratives and apocalyptic philosophy

23

MICHAEL A. PETERS

3 ‘Declinism’ and discourses of decline - the end of the war in Afghanistan and the limits of American power

36

MICHAEL A. PETERS

4 Russian apocalypse, Christian fascism and the dangers of a limited nuclear war

47

MICHAEL A. PETERS

5 The threat of nuclear war: Peace studies in an apocalyptic age

54

MICHAEL A. PETERS

6 Life and death in the Anthropocene: Educating for survival amid climate and ecosystem changes and potential civilisation collapse TINA BESLEY AND MICHAEL A. PETERS

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7 Education for ecological democracy

76

MICHAEL A. PETERS

8 Citizen science and post-normal science in a post-truth era: Democratising knowledge; Socialising responsibility

84

MICHAEL A. PETERS AND TINA BESLEY

9 Cultural Apocalypse, Western colonial domination and ‘the End of the World’

101

MICHAEL A PETERS, CHENGBING WANG, CARL MIKA AND STEVE FULLER

10 The coming pandemic era

117

MICHAEL A. PETERS

11 The Armageddon Club: Education for the future of humanity 126 MICHAEL A. PETERS

12 Educational philosophy and post-apocalyptic survival

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MICHAEL A. PETERS

13 Postscript: Zombie education and culture in the global apocalypse: Pedagogies of the walking dead

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MICHAEL A. PETERS AND TINA BESLEY

Index143

Contributors

Tina Besley is Distinguished Professor at the Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University. She was previously Professor and Associate Dean International in the Faculty of Education, University of Waikato, New Zealand; Research Professor, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign; Full Professor, California State University San Bernardino; and Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow where she began her academic career in late 2000, after 16 years as Secondary School Teacher, Head of Guidance and Counsellor in New Zealand. She is the Founding President of the Association for Visual Pedagogies, Past President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia and honoured as a Fellow of both learned societies. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, UK. In Philosophy of Education, she uses the later work of Michel Foucault on subjectivity, free speech and governmentality. In global studies in education, she explores policy, identities and cultures and interculturalism. Tina works closely with Prof. Michael A. Peters and with a wide international network of scholars in editorial roles for many journals and books. She has published over 30 books and monographs and numerous journal articles. Currently, she is Editor and Project manager of PESA Agora and Associate Editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory and the Beijing International Review of Education. Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Fuller is best known for his foundational work in the field of ‘social epistemology’, which is the name of a quarterly journal that he founded in 1987 as well as the first of his 25 books. In recent years, his research has been concerned with the future of humanity in light of ‘trans-’ and ‘post-’ human scientific and cultural trends as well as the future of the university as an institution. Fuller’s most recent books are Academic Caesar: University Leadership is Hard (Sage 2016), Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game (Anthem 2018), Nietzschean Meditations: Untimely Thoughts at the Dawn of the Transhuman Era (Schwabe 2019) and The Player’s Guide to the Post Truth Condition: The Name of the Game (Anthem 2020). Fuller’s works have been translated into

viii Contributors

30 languages. He was awarded a D.Litt. by the University of Warwick in 2007 for sustained lifelong contributions to scholarship. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the UK Academy of Social Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Carl Mika is Maori of the Tuhourangi iwi and a professor in Aotahi: School of Māori and Indigenous Studies, University of Canterbury, specializing in Māori and Indigenous philosophy, with a particular focus on its revitalization within a colonized reality. Investigating indigenous notions of holism, he wrote Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence (2017, Routledge), along with several articles and chapters, on the issue of colonization and reductionism. He is currently working on the Maori concepts of nothingness and darkness in response to an Enlightenment focus on clarity and am speculating on how they can form the backdrop of academic expression. He is also contributing to philosophical discussions arising around matauranga Maori and science. He held an adjunct professorship at RMIT and am involved in projects that engage with Indigenous philosophy: Sámi mánná jurddavázzin – Sámi Children as Thought Herders: Storytelling and critical philosophical inquiries in Indigenous Early Years Education (Swedish Research Council); and Understanding Indigenous ethics and holism within academic and Aboriginal community research settings (SSHRC, Canada). Michael A. Peters is Distinguished Professor of Education at Beijing Normal University and Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois. He is the Executive Editor of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory. His interests are in education, philosophy and social policy, and he is the author of over 100 books, including The Chinese Dream: Educating the Future (2019), Wittgenstein, Education and Rationality (2020) and Wittgenstein: Antifoundationalism, Technoscience and Education (2020). Chengbing Wang is a Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophy at Shanxi University, Taiyuan, China, and also one of the editors of the English-language journal, Frontiers of Philosophy, in China. His main research fields are American pragmatism, postmodern philosophy and philosophy of social identity. He has published more than 90 articles, 20 monographs and numerous translations. Some of his publications are The Trip of Pragmatism in China, The Crisis of Identity in the Context of Modernity, The Themes of Postmodern Philosophy, Possible Approaches to the Comparative Study of William James and Traditional Chinese Philosophy, Consumer Culture and the Crisis of Identity and The Influence of Virtual Space on Contemporary Identity: The Perspective of Philosophy. He is currently heading a major national project on the Translation of the Philosophical Works of William James.

Introduction Global apocalypse: Educational philosophy and post-apocalyptic survival Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley After Buddha was dead people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave, – an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow. – And we – we have still to overcome his shadow! Book III – Aphorism #108 (Nietzsche, ‘New struggles’, The Gay Science)

Western apocalypse We may well have called the book ‘Western Apocalypse’ because in the West, ‘the end’ and ‘the end times’ have been expressed and theorized over the millennia in a series of related eschatological discourses and tropes depicting the end of the West as the end of Christendom following ‘the death of God’ and the end of philosophy. This is a theme that has occupied us over the intervening years since the completion of The Last Book of Postmodernism: ­Apocalyptic Thinking, Philosophy and Education in the Twenty-First Century (Peters, 2011). This book was an outcome of an engagement over many years with contemporary Continental philosophy following philosophical significance and historical influence of Nietzsche’s statement ‘God is dead’. It was the basis for the ‘apocalyptic philosophers’ (Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, etc.) who lived after Nietzsche and Heidiegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche. Both postmodernism and poststructuralism were understood as related currents of thought that entertained and tried to grapple with ‘the end’ as a series of reflections on apocalyptic philosophy, religion and literature representing a process of secularization described as ‘apocalyptic thinking’: a set of discourses and cultural phenomenon that, at least in the popular imaginary, proclaims in apocalyptic tones ‘the end’: the end of modernism, the end of metaphysics, the end of humanism, the end of Man, the death of God, the end of value. It resonates with its modernist Hegelian sibling discourses, both rightist and leftist, that still carry some theoretical weight: the end of ideology, the end of history, the end of the welfare state, the end of DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895-1

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communism or capitalism. And, at the same time, it shares the same kind of popular expectation of something that follows ‘the end’: whether it be ‘the new’, ‘the beginning’, or ‘a re- turn’, historically speaking. In one sense these eschatological narratives of endings (and beginnings), as I have argued, are endemic to western culture and help define both its cultural specificity and its sources of renewal. (Peters, 2008, p. 496) What is apocalyptic thinking if not the contemplation of the end and its overcoming? How much more significant a question is there for educational philosophy? We are also reminded how deeply the ideological, political and political economy discourses embed apocalyptic values imbued with religious imprint that reflects styles in historiography and philosophy of time, especially the linear rhythm that reaches an apex or denouement or resolution. The Hegelian and Marxist discourses share a similar logic in the dialectic but the latter self-consciously sheds Christian metaphysics; perhaps, this was an early stage of secularization of apocalypse brought about by Marx. Originally a concept meaning ‘disclosure’, or ‘revealing’ in the ancient Greek ‘apokalypsis’, apocalypse became the apocalypse of John (of Patmos believed to be the Apostle St John who wrote the Gospel of John became known after being exiled by the Roman Emperor Domitian). It was based on a letter he wrote to Christians that became The Book of Revelations as the final book in the New Testament and the only apocalyptic one. It came to occupy a central place in the canon and Christian eschatology. The book begins with John (circa 81– 96 AD), identified by modern scholarship as a Christian prophet, often called ‘John of Patmos’, because he begins to write on the Aegean Island of Patmos addressing a letter to the ‘Seven Churches of Asia’, the main early churches of Christianity located in Anatolia or Asia Minor (present day T ­ ürkiye). He is instructed by Jesus to write a letter to the seven churches, often interpreted as the seven stages of the Western Church. In the first part of the book, John starts with a reproach and admonition to follow the Spirit and the seven angels. In the second part, he describes a series of prophetic visions including the Seven-Headed Dragon, the Serpent and the Beast, ending with the Second Coming of Christ. A scroll with Seven Seals is presented and opened. Seven trumpets and seven angels. The trumpets are sounded announcing fires on Earth burning a third of all the trees and in the sea killing a third of all creatures. A falling star poisons a third of all springs and rivers. A fifth trumpet signals the First Woe, the sixth signals the Second Woe that releases four angels who prepare 200 million horsemen who kill a third of humanity. Events leading up to the Third Woe mention Seven Spiritual Figures: a woman wearing a white robe, a dragon with seven heads which drags a third of all the stars to throw at the Earth, a beast with seven heads emerges from the sea which blasphemes and defeats the saints, a beast from the Earth which forces people to wear the ‘mark of the beast’ and the Lamb

Introduction 3

which is victorious over the Beast and offers redemption. Seven Bowls containing plague bearing the wrath of God are given to seven angels who pour it on the Earth to afflict the followers of the Beast. In the aftermath, the New Babylon is destroyed, followed by the marriage supper of the Lamb and the Judgement of the Beast, the Dragon and the Dead. A new heaven and earth replace the old. God dwells with humanity. There is no more suffering. The River and the Tree of Life heal all peoples, and the curse of sin is lifted. Christ’s second coming is at hand. It is thus of little surprise that those fundamentalist Christian megachurches now preach of an imminent end to globalization as though the deep code of history was written in the Bible and that the apocalypse is upon us. It is a religious interpretation that also seems to cohere with contemporary events – the ravages of global climate warming including the horrendous floods, intense rain events, droughts and rising seas; concerns about ecological and biodiversity collapse; the perceived increase in conflicts around the world including the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the USA, and now the possibility of a tactical nuclear war especially in the Ukraine war; the vulnerability of the world’s financial architecture including the brinkmanship of the US debt ceiling currently at $31.4 T, the relentless cost of living crisis and dedollarization with a shift away from an international system based on US petro-dollars. To this general grim picture, other scholars draw attention to the crisis of democracy with the corruption and compromise of both the US and UK models and their slippage in the world index, just as other systems that are less liberal seem to be on the rise, especially those that profess a socialist model of government. The apocalypse is revelation, an apocalyptic prophecy, that reveals divine mysteries and apocalyptic hope to persecuted Christians to overcome death and destruction. Its sources are books of the Old Testament – Daniel, Ezekiel, Psalms and Isaiah – and variously, it is often taken to describe the future or the broad sweep of history, the future of the planet and the spiritual struggle between good and evil. The status of Daniel is contentious, and its place in the canon is disputed. As the last book of the Christian Bible, it was not only influential in early Christianity but also its language and symbolism have come pervade all of Western culture, theology and art to occupy a cornerstone of Western philosophy and political theory. Apocalypse also takes its name from the Book of Revelation as the last book of the New Testament, where the word stands for a specific kind of revelation, that which is concerned with the divine disclosure of God’s purpose in history. Its allegories are sometimes read literally and permit a myriad of eschatological interpretations among Protestant, Eastern Orthodoxy, Seventh-Day Adventist, Bahai’i and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Revelation has also influenced Hindu and Jewish philosophy. We follow modern biblical scholarship in understanding these books within the context of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature that depicts ‘the end times’ of an age and

4  Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley

a cosmological vision that reveals the secret of the future. We are primarily interested in the historicist interpretations of Revelation and its processes of secularization as well as the genre of literature and philosophy that foretells the cataclysmic end of the world rather than Jewish or Christian apocalypticism. The title of ‘Global Apocalypse’ is meant to draw attention to the fact that a Western phenomenon understood through its religious, literary, philosophical and economic forms is an expression of a worldview, world history and global economic system that is essentially the outcome of industrial capitalism which is the immediate cause of climate warming and the global ecological apocalypse that we currently face with its weather extremes, sea rises and broader environmental consequences for air, water and earth – that is, for the elements that sustain life. In the broader context of modern history and political economy, we can talk of the end of the Western colonial system and the end of Western industrial capitalism. If we yoke these two systems together, it is because the colonial system was an extension of industrial capitalism that involved a massive transfer of wealth. Even slavery, conceived of as plantation agriculture, was based on the principles of industrial capitalism. Mark Harvey (2019) disputes the myths that Britain freed itself from the moral taint of slavery when it emancipated slaves in 1834 and perpetrated the view that the industrial revolution was a new stage of capitalism characterized by a market logic based on free labour. He argues that by 1860, ‘the British economy was more dependent on slave labour than it ever had been, and on an unprecedented scale’.1 Both C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, whose works became the foundation stones of postcolonial literature, were among the very few in terms of colonial historiography that insisted on the treatment of slavery and capitalism together rather than in parallel or separately. Both provided economic explanations for the rise of British abolitionism focussing on the decline of profitability of slave industries (Neilson & Peters, 2020). These complex shifts are not clearly evident or obvious to the casual observer although both the literal and metaphorical versions of apocalypse inform much of the Christian West and marks what it has bequeathed to the world. It might be argued that the international system, a product of a Western liberal international institutions set up with Bretton Woods, and the United Nations (UN) system itself are Western conceptions of the global architecture that once served the interests of the West but now face major reform in an emerging global economy and multipolar world increasingly structured by China, India and the rest of the BRICS. This multipolarity might be described as postindustrial, post-American and postcapitalist in the sense that such a future represents a very different moment of world capitalism characterized by ‘the social economy’ – the Chinese socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics, the Indian transition from mixed to social economy, socialistoriented economy of Vietnam and, perhaps, the social economy of Europe. There have been constant reminders of how the world system is increasingly

Introduction 5

wired, one capitalist system that grows through interconnectivity, and yet admits of different styles of state-led capitalism and the promise of the public domain. It also represents the shift away from a neoliberal war economy toward one that is aware of the huge inequalities generated by neoliberal capitalism both within and between countries. It is one that where digital interconnectivity prevails that privileges network and web economies and digital trade. It is an economy that is state-led and based on the growth and control of state-owned enterprises (SOE), and perhaps most importantly, it is oriented to sustainability and environmental self-renewal. It may also be governed by a one-party system that is nevertheless democratic and dedicated to a fairer and more representative international system. This ‘ideal’ scenario surely symbolizes the end of the West and the rise of the East, but it does not mean necessarily the end of the world, although it does indicate the end of Western or neoliberal capitalism and the current era of financialization. Many critics have indicated also that to swap Western neoliberal capitalism for Confucian capitalism is to simply move to a more rapacious and authoritarian system that denies individual freedom. This may also be the case, and yet, what we want to put forward are shifts that seem evident to us in an evolving world system with characteristics that must be recognized as saviour elements of a world system that does not collapse upon itself. Apocalyptic philosophy Philosophically, Oswald Spengler’s (1918) The Decline of the West set the tone for apocalyptic philosophy in the twentieth century. In The Decline of the West (1918), Oswald Spengler regarded cultures as organisms and world history as their collective biography. The nine cultures he identified – Ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Greco-Roman (Apollonian), Arabic (Magian), Mexican, Western (Faustian) and Russian – each become a ‘civilization’ when it reaches its late stage, a state that becomes petrified in its technological form that controls mass society and declines or degenerates. It became a perfect reference point for understanding Nietzsche and Heidegger, considered together, and also Wittgenstein. This line of Continental thinking predates Nietzsche. No thinker comes without baggage. Nietzsche drew his inspiration from Greek tragedy. In The Birth of Tragedy first published in 1872, he argued that Greek tragedy grew out of a fusion of the Apollonian and Dionysian dimensions, a combination of restraint and passion. Socratic rationalism for Nietzsche spelled the end of tragedy. Nietzsche also took his inspiration from Schopenhauer, Wagner and Goethe and was strongly influenced by Emerson and the Persian prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra), 1500–500 BC, who entered the Western tradition through Judaism and Platonism. Wittgenstein is infected with this general pessimism, falling away from ­culture and unwillingly to embrace a scientific and technological civilization.

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Not Nietzsche, nor Heidegger nor Wittgenstein entertain the future history of humanity with any redeeming qualities. Together, they foretell only of a dystopian future devoid of any spiritual heart that represents the end of philosophy. Their work in different ways has contributed to that array of postmetaphysical possibilities evident in deconstruction, postmodernism and a series of related ‘posts’ that help us to envisage a better, more benign state within humanity that might be able to rescue or renew itself and the planet in the process. Derrida, Foucault and Rorty see themselves in some relation to the tradition of the end of philosophy where redemption is possible after the critique of empiricism. Cornelius Castoriadis (1989) captures this moment when he writes ‘We are living through a protracted crisis of Western society and culture. The diagnosis is not invalidated by its innumerable repetitions – from Rousseau and the romantics through Nietzsche, Spengler, Trotsky to Heidegger and beyond’. He suggests that these thinkers are ‘symptoms of the crisis and belong to it’, and he writes, ‘Philosophy is a central element of the Greek-Western project of individual and social autonomy; the end of philosophy would mean no more and no less than the end of freedom’. Freedom is threatened here mostly by the waning and loss of critique that cannot put into question our existing institutions. Nietzsche’s ‘God is Dead’ is announced in The Gay Science (1882) and repeated in Thus Spake Zarathrustra (1883) which indicated that the belief in the Christian God was no longer credible or sustainable. Both the faith and all the institutions build upon were about to collapse, along with the system of European morality. It means the end of Christendom. ‘The death of God’ was a theme that had appeared in Jean Paul’s (1796-7) Romantic novel Siebenkäs and in Hegel’s and Philipp Mainländer’s theory of redemption. The death of God represented a crisis of the moral system of belief predicated on Christianity. It was Heidegger who decisively came to understand Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ as the end of Western metaphysics, which constituted the end of philosophy and of any possible metaphysical view. This eschatological reading had strong reverberations for generations of both Western philosophers and theologians including Tillich and a group of contemporary Christian thinkers such as Paul Van Buren, William Hamilton, Mark C. Taylor, John D. Caputo and Rabbi Richard L. Rubenstein. Heidegger understands metaphysics as the history of Being and sought to overcome metaphysics. In The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking (2002), Heidegger asks what it means that philosophy has entered a final phase and ‘task what is reserved for thinking at the end of philosophy’ (p. 55) having explained the old meaning of ‘end’ as ‘place’ he goes on to write: ‘The end of philosophy is the place in which the whole of philosophy’s history is gathered in its most extreme possibility’ (p. 57). He explains that metaphysics is Platonism and Nietzsche’s philosophy is anti-Platonism. He maintains the reversal of metaphysics takes place in the hands of Karl Marx who represents philosophy in its final form, its near completion. Philosophy gives way to the sciences, already implicit in Greek

Introduction 7

philosophy and thus ‘philosophy turns into the empirical science of man’ and ‘the technology by which he established himself in the world’ ruled by ‘the criterion of scientific discovery’ and further determined by cybernetics (pp. 57– 58). As Heidegger prophetically remarks, ‘This science corresponds to the determination of man as an acting social being. For it is the theory of the steering of the possible planning and arrangement of human labor’. A digital or cybernetic capitalism for Heidegger is simply a fulfilment of a world civilization based on the West’s technological-scientific industrial system rather than a departure from it. He thinks of the possibility of overcoming such a world civilization, a possibility that is written in Marx’s the ‘end of philosophy’ that makes a ‘productive dialogue’ with his work possible, as he says in the ‘Letter on Humanism’. Heidegger credits Marx with a grounding in history and also the historicity of philosophy itself that must now change rather than simply interpret the world in order to overcome the estrangement and alienation produced by industrial capitalism. Heidegger’s understanding of Nietzsche provides a theme that links the end of philosophy directly to the set of cybernetic technologies that we recognize today as ‘digital’. The unavoidable question is whether digital technology and ‘Big Tech’ as the future of the global system of capitalism also have the power to heal and to redeem society after the industrial experiment has degraded us and the environment. Does a socialist digital global capitalism sacrifice the freedom of liberal capitalism to present a totalitarianism based on facial recognition and other digital surveillance technology, as many critics argue? There are clear presentiments that converge on one global system on the edge of ‘chaos’ and complexity with its wild systems swinging to extremes highlighting the issue that threatens to extinguish us. If there is a philosophy of post-apocalyptic survival, then it must be concerned by chance that humanity against the clock can marshal the political will and the resources to overcome its fundamental inequalities and extremes of wealth, its ecological crises and its political divisions in order to coordinate investments in a new ways of thinking that we should call ‘ecological’ in the broadest sense aimed at the protection and enhancement of living systems that can sustain life and its future generations. In this sense ‘ends’ issue forth in a myriad of related tropes – the end of slavery, the end of colonialism, the end of industrial capitalism, the end of empire but – can also imply redemption, renewal, a generative and progressive world change directed at those overlapping crises that characterize a very fragmented, delicate, world on the brink of total collapse and catastrophe. We are in the midst of transition beyond the industrial technologies to new energy systems and new digital systems that have taken the form of strategic technologies that drive the economic system – semiconductors, supercomputing, quantum technologies, genomic sciences, 5G and 6G – what we call ‘biodigitalism’, referring the harnessing of biology and information as the twin cultural forces shaping our evolution (Peters, Jandric, & Hayes, 2022).

8  Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley

The end of the West, of Western domination, also heralds ‘great power competition’ (GPC) after the post-Cold War era of international relations and a renewed intensified system rivalry and strategic competition between the USA and China. GPC has been a central element in the US Military strategy since Obama’s presidency, also figuring in Trump’s and Biden’s National Defense Strategy. The end of the West might be taken as a specific question about whether the post-Cold war era is over and whether we are witnessing the collapse of US hegemony and unipolar system. This challenge is also what is referred to in the Biden Administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS, October 2022) under the heading ‘The Competition for What Comes Next’ where ‘the PRC presents America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge …’ (p. 8). This decade is taken to be ‘decisive, in settling our in setting the terms of our competition with the PRC’. The secularization of the apocalypse for us names the Seven Great Global Apocalypses: the Apocalypse of Climate Warming, the Western Roots of the Cultural Apocalypse, the Decline of West and Rise of the East, the End of Industrial Capitalism, the Technological Convergence-Singularity, Multipolarity and the Collapse of US Hegemony and the Unipolar System, and World War Three and Great Power Competition. Each of these are apocalyptic themes and questions that are the basis for some of the essays that follow. We have arranged them in order of writing starting with ‘Western Civilization 101’ and ending with ‘Educational Philosophy and Post-Apocalyptic Survival’. All the essays are educational and hold out the hope of post-apocalyptic survival as possible and as a prescription for a world that manages the transition from West to East, to a new multipolarity, that does not necessarily entail ‘GPC’, or ‘system rivalry’ but rather a focus on a common and cooperative approach among nations in the production of global public goods of sustainability, education, peace and development. The essays collected here were written over the last couple of years. They follow the arc of the decline of the West, of American power, and the possibility of the collapse of global civilization. The book also examines Russian apocalypse, Christian fascism and the threat of a limited nuclear war, together with a treatment of the broad theme of peace studies in an apocalyptic age. Educating for survival amid climate and ecosystem changes and potential civilization collapse, what we call ‘Life and death in the Anthropocene’ briefly examines ‘education for ecological democracy’ and the status of citizen s­ cience as a means of democratizing knowledge and socializing responsibility. The collection also includes ‘cultural apocalypse’ as a form of Western colonial domination that represented the ‘end times’ for many of the world’s indigenous peoples and ‘The coming pandemic’, a brief reflection on the Covid years. We should remember that colonization, a form of ‘ecological imperialism’, brought with it old pathogens from the Old World to the New World and was responsible for the near extinctions of indigenous populations that had no

Introduction 9

prior exposure nor immunity to the plagues of small pox, influenza, syphilis, venereal diseases, measles, typhus, cholera and other viruses and bacterial diseases. We would like to acknowledge the coauthorship here of our colleagues Wang Chengbing, Carl Mika and Steve Fuller who worked to provide us with their contributions on the theme of cultural apocalypse. They have always proved sympathetic to collective writing and to many of the themes that we have investigated over the years. Our heartfelt thanks go out to them. Educational philosophy and post-apocalyptic survival is not necessarily to be viewed as a temporal or literal narrative as in the popular literature of zombies and the walking dead (which we have also written on). It is rather a complex set of tropes in religion, philosophy, science and popular culture that require study and disentangling, all the while with a view to the future and to the survival of the next generation. So, the ‘apocalyptic curriculum’ has a strong historical and religious basis and it has an implicit theory of colonization for indigenous folk and, more recently, a set of empirical themes that map the health of ecosystems. There is also room for an investigation of the obsession in popular culture for ‘end times’ themes of disaster movies, novels and TV series reflected in fashion and popular music. Educational philosophy and post-apocalyptic survival, if anything, is a reflection of humanity’s precarity in a cosmological and global sense, and the fate of the West as if faces the greatest challenges to its postwar systems of governance, economics and education. Global risk assessment is an advanced statistical and complex science that indicates that it is not one catastrophic event but a series of interrelated overlapping crises, each with its own time series, that cascade and provide tipping points making recovery and resilience much more difficult and less likely. This apocalyptic agenda is increasingly the platform for new social movements that call for action and are becoming less tolerant of governments that are not committed the large-scale political change to save the planet and ensure the survival of humanity. One theme that does not figure here is the recent storm about artificial intelligence (AI) that ChatGPT-4 has caused around the world and the prospect of a general AI, maybe 20 years away, that as a source of superintelligence can control humanity without identifying with its values, interests and institutions. This is a theme that requires the most intense scrutiny but is beyond the scope of the present work. Apocalyptic thinking may also be a cultural and philosophical resource for understanding the basis of resilience and renewal of the world, for a fresh start, an opportunity for greater democracy, participation and global justice. In this sense, we would like to see this collection as belonging to the tradition of apocalyptic philosophy but one that leaves open the future and the possibility of sustainable life. These apocalyptic themes seem to us as unassailable as the basis of educational philosophy and theory in order to explore and address the question of post-apocalyptic survival.

10  Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley

Note 1 https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/empire-decolonisation/slavery-coercedlabour-and-the-development-of-industrial-capitalism-in-britain/

References Castoriadis, C. (1989). The ‘end of philosophy’? Salmagundi, 82/83 (Spring–Summer 1989), 3–23. Harvey, M. (2019). Slavery, indenture and the development of British industrial capitalism, History Workshop Journal, 88(Autumn 2019), 66–88. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbz027 Heidegger, M. (2002). The end of philosophy and the task of thinking. In J. Stambaugh (Ed.), On time and being (pp. 55–73). University of Chicago Press. Neilson, D., & Peters, M. A. (2020). Capitalism’s slavery. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52(5), 475–484. DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2019.1595323. Nietzsche, F. (1882). The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (W. Kaufmann, transl., with commentary). Vintage Books, 1974. Nietzsche, F. (1883). Thus Spake Zarathrustra: A book for all and none (the Project Gutenberg eBook). Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/ 1998-h/1998-h.htm Paul, Jean (1796-7). Siebenkäs, Internet Archive. Retrieved from https://archive.org/ details/flowerfruitthorn00jeanuoft Peters, M. A. (2008). Apocalyptic thinking now: The ends of postmodernism. Review of Contemporary Philosophy. Retrieved from https://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/contents-rcp/113-volume-7-2008/494-apocalyptic-thinking-nowtheends-of-postmodernism Peters, M. A. (2011). The Last Book of Postmodernism: Apocalyptic Thinking, Philosophy and Education in the Twenty-First Century. Peter Lang. Peters, M. A., Jandric, P., & Hayes, S. (Eds.). (2022). Bioinformational philosophy and postdigital knowledge ecologies. Springer. Peters, M.A., Liz Jackson, Marianna Papastephanou, Petar Jandrić, George Lazaroiu, Colin W. Evers, Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, Daniel Araya, Marek Tesar, Carl Mika, Lei Chen, Chengbing Wang, Sean Sturm, Sharon Rider & Steve Fuller (2023) AI and the future of humanity: ChatGPT-4, philosophy and education - Critical responses, Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2023.2213437 Spengler, O (1918) The Decline of the West. (Der Untergang des Abendlande, http:// www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Spengler,+Oswald/Der+Untergang+des+Abendla ndes). English trans v. 1 (1926) and v. 2 (1928), Alfred A. Knopf US National Security Strategy (NSS). (2022, October). https://www.whitehouse. gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-­ Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf

Chapter 1

Western civilization 101 Michael A. Peters

Civilization as a technological system The concept of civilization in the West recognizes the origins of the term in civitas and civilité as the development of civil society and, in particular, the expression of the history of sympathy, manners and etiquette as a basis for the emergence of social and political institutions that regulate human relations as a higher order expression of ethics. With this interpretation the concept of civilization is not primarily seen as a technological system, although technology is indeed part of the concept as part of material culture. Rather civilization, on this view, is primarily assessed on the significance of the rise of abstract and symbolic systems – including writing, religion, philosophy, law, mathematics and those aspects of human endeavour that are the most difficult to research in past civilizations because they require inference from the systems of artifacts or from texts. There is no doubt that technology considered as a system with its characteristics of autonomy, unity, universality and totalization provide the criteria for ‘progress’ in terms of automation, augmentation and control (Ellul, 1980). It is also clear that the ability to store and process information including writing and coinage was critical to the growth of early human societies (Shin et al., 2020). The Russian physicist Nikolai Kardashev designed a scale for measuring a civilization’s technological level based on the amount of energy it is able to use, differentiating between Type I civilization (Planetary) close to the current level attained on Earth able to harness all the energy from the Earth-Sun system (estimated at 1.74 × 1017 watts); Type II civilization (Stellar) capable of using and channelling the entire radiation output of its star (4 × 1026 watts); Type III civilization (Galactic) harnessing energy at the level of its galaxy (4 × 1037 watts) (Kardashev, 1964; Lemarchand, 1992). The focus on scale levels is useful as there are examples of human civilization undergoing large-scale transitions such as the Industrial Revolution and, perhaps, the revolution of quantum computing to come but the Kardashev scale and its extensions to Type IV (Universal) such as ‘extragalactic’ suggested by Michio Kaku (2006) in his book Parallel Worlds: A journey through creation is certainly of interest in

DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895-2

12  Michael A. Peters

theoretical physics but has less of the power of application to understand and discriminate among past or existing world civilizations.1 The possible alternative of information mastery first suggested by Carl Sagan in 1973 based on bits of information available to a civilization has interesting applications especially since it might be argued that we are now to all intents and purposes a single planetary civilization.2 My own philosophical and historical predilections orient me toward a hermeneutical model based on texts and the interpretation of texts that predisposes us towards recognising the fondness for natural metaphors that draw on organic models of ‘birth’, ‘growth’ and ‘death’ when analyzing complex social wholes that is emblematic of our deep cultural acceptance of the principles of developmental thinking that look to ‘the state of nature’ discussed in natural philosophy. The emergence of Darwinian evolutionary principles in the life sciences, in biology but also in the earth sciences, predisposes us toward an acceptance of a common ancestor. In philosophy and the humanities, the concept of development was used in relation to humanity well before the emergence of evolutionary sciences with Darwin and others in the nineteenth century, to refer to both well-being and to progress. In the modern era Kant, Hegel and Marx interpreted the concept of development as a form of progress. Indeed, the march of civilization and history was based on the assumption of human perfectibility that was a major characteristic of Enlightenment thought. The study of natural history in the eighteenth century revealed that Europe and Europeans were both ‘civilized’ and allegedly superior to all other cultures, and as such were responsible for a civilizing mission in colonial world history. Later the same assumptions buried in historical teleology with buried Christological cosmologies seem to require the natural precondition of a concept of freedom as the basis for liberation, westernization and modernization – a seemingly natural consequence of the historic rise of the West. In this paper I begin from ‘Civilization as civitas’, the birth of civil society, that I investigate by reference to Adam Ferguson’s history of civil society and Norbert Elias’s the civilizing process, before examining the fortunes of ‘western civ’ as a pedagogical concept. Civilization as civitas The history of the concept is the history of the German word Kultur and the French word civilité from whence comes the English word civilization in the early eighteenth century. The word is derived from civil and cité, (city), from the Latin civitas that is a theory of jurisprudential contract binding citizens, granting them both rights and giving them responsibilities. The civitas is the collective social body of citizens and also the contract. The French historian Claude Nicolet (1980) traces the concept to the amalgamation of Romans and Sabines presented in the legends of Rome in his The world

Western civilization 101  13

of the citizen in republican Rome in which he explores civitas along with census, militia, comitia (politics), aerarium (treasury), libertas, popularitus, as well as the army and the body. He explains from the time of the suspension of the tributum (167BC) how the ‘constitution’ ceased to function and the ‘assemblies’ were reformed several times. He argues ‘almost certainly, the structured balance of rights and duties which seemed to me to explain the principles of ­Roman civil life never existed in practice: it was kind of a blueprint, a theoretical model and ideal towards which Roman institutions tended in their heyday but never reached’ (Preface to the second French edition). It is an ideal that existed in the ‘communal mind’ even if it was never realized. The greatness of Rome, he says, rested on its civil base from whence the ruling oligarchy went on to Romanize the world and including an openness toward the foreigner. Popper appeals to Pericles of Athens as a motif and justification for the concept of the open society (Peters & Besley, 2016). Like the Greek concept of Polis the Roman term civitas referred to the citizen and citizenship, the community of citizens under Roman law that constituted an autonomous cell with its own council and magistrates that had the legal infrastructure to set up as a city, to carry out the law, to conduct the census and to collect taxes. This is significant because it provides the early history of a term that is on the one hand synonymous with civilization, and on the other connected to empire and the res publica (public, that which is held in common) the root word for republic and commonwealth, and a derivation of politeia (city-state). Nicolet then indicates how significant the idea of civitas is in the mind of its citizens, even if it never existed in practice, and this I would argue also applies to the word and concept civilization, as opposed to the historical or sociological reality. The implication is that there is a significant ideational aspect to the concept of civilization as well as its actual development in terms of material culture especially in relation to changes in technology (architecture, energy etc) noted by most definitions that suggest a list of criteria including the development of symbolic systems in communication, writing, math, law, religion and political organisation as well as the social complexity that comes with city development such as specialization and increasing division of ­labour. I stress the ideational component because it is the basis and outcome of the development of knowledge systems that in the case of early civilizations can only be accessed today through an archaeological analysis of material culture. These knowledge systems contain abstract and symbolic forms in writing, law, contracts, religion and philosophy – dare I say, spiritual, in the sense of the symbolic expression of universal values concerning human survival and well-being. Ferguson’s history of civil society Adam Ferguson’s (1767) An Essay on The History of Civil Society begins with a discourse on ‘The General Characteristics of Human Nature’ by referring

14  Michael A. Peters

to ‘the State of Nature’ where he demonstrates the fashionable preference for metaphors of nature and natural growth and development: Natural productions are generally formed by degrees. Vegetables are raised from a tender shoot, and animals from an infant state. The latter, being active, extend together their operations and their powers, and have a progress in what they perform, as well as in the faculties they acquire. This progress in the case of man is continued to a greater extent than in that of any other animal. Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood, but the species itself from rudeness to civilization. Ferguson (1723–1816) was a Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. He emphasized humans as social beings and believed in the progression of the species in terms of moral perfectibility. The book is made up of five parts: 1. ‘Of the general characteristics of human nature’ that examines principles of self-preservation, ‘union among mankind’, war and dissension, intellectual powers, moral sentiment, happiness and ‘national felicity’; 2. ‘Of the history of rude nations’ based on sources from antiquity, with commentaries on property and interest; 3. ‘Of the history of policy and arts’ including influences on climate, political institutions, establishments (as national objects) and ‘manners’, population and wealth, national defence and conquest, civil liberty, and the arts; 4. ‘Of the consequences of the advancement of civil and commercial arts’ comprised of the separation of arts and professions, ‘manners of polished and commercial nations’; 5. ‘Of the decline of nations’ including supposed eminence, relaxation of national spirit, and national waste; 6. ‘Of corruption and political slavery’ with a focus on corruption, luxury, progress and the termination of despotism. Ferguson’s emphasis on ‘moral sentiment’, greatly influencing Adam Smith, and his emphasis on ‘manners’ predating Elias. His explication of moral sentiment together with ‘happiness’ and ‘national felicity’ lead to his articulation of ‘civil society’; as he argues at Part Third, Section VI It is in conducting the affairs of civil society, that mankind find the exercise of their best talents, as well as the object of their best affections. It is in being grafted on the advantages of civil society, that the art of war is brought to perfection; that the resources of armies, and the complicated springs to be touched in their conduct, are best understood. This is so under conditions of peace through the emergence of sympathy (empathy) and the restraints of law tied to the protection of property rights: ‘The enjoyment of peace, however, and the prospect of being able to exchange one commodity for another, turns, by degrees, the hunter and the warrior into a tradesman and a merchant’ (Part 4). As Ferguson famously writes discussing the history of political institutions: ‘Every step and every movement of the

Western civilization 101  15

multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design’ and also writes in his notes: ‘Mankind, we are told, are devoted to interest; and this, in all commercial nations, is undoubtedly true: But it does not follow, that they are, by their natural dispositions, averse to society and mutual affection: Proofs of the contrary remain, even where interest triumphs most.’ Ferguson (1723–1816) as one of the key thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment attempts to reclaim and revitalise the nature of citizenship and participation in the modern state and to demonstrate the significance of civic and communal virtues as an indispensable part of commercial society based on the social nature of human beings. It is a conception that shares many features with thinkers of the French Enlightenment, with Buffon’s Histoire naturelle and with Montesquieu including an account of a conception of progress as an unintended consequence (invisible hand) of the division of labour. Ferguson’s historical model of the significance of active citizenship differs from those of his countrymen, both Hume and Smith, in embracing a distinctive approach to modernity. Michel Foucault (2008, p. 298) [1979] recognises the importance of ­Ferguson in The Birth of Biopolitics when he writes of civil society in relation to the ‘principle of spontaneous synthesis’ well in advance of Hayek, to propose an account of civil society that ‘gives man his humanity’ and makes room for ‘sympathy’ (and equality) in a communitarian sense: To simplify matters, I will take the most fundamental, almost statutory text regarding the characterization of civil society. This is Ferguson’s famous text, translated into French in 1783 with the title Essais sur l’histoire de la société civile, and which is very close to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the word ‘nation’ in Smith, moreover, having more or less the same meaning as civil society in Ferguson. We have here the political correlate, the correlate in terms of civil society, of what Adam Smith studied in purely economic terms. Ferguson’s civil society is actually the concrete, encompassing element within which the economic men Smith tried to study operate. I would like to pick out three or four essential characteristics of this civil society in Ferguson: first, civil society understood as an historical-natural constant; second, civil society as principle of spontaneous synthesis; third, civil society as permanent matrix of political power; and fourth, civil society as the motor element of history.3 For Ferguson ‘The nature of human nature is to be historical, because the nature of human nature is to be social. There is no human nature separable from the very fact of society…So, the social bond develops spontaneously’ (p. 299). It has no pre-history where ‘the happiness of the individual is the great end of civil society (p. 301) where civil society can support and encourage

16  Michael A. Peters

the economic interactions without being reduced to them. Civil society, then, is not simply an association of economic subjects or directed purely to the end of profit through exchange: ‘what links individuals to each other in civil society is instinct, sentiment and sympathy, it is the impulse of benevolence that individuals feel for one another…’It is not purely economic egoism but also ‘disinterested interests wider than egoism itself’ (p. 301). This textual examination is a prolegomena to Foucault’s analysis of liberalism and the emergence of a form of political rationality that mediates a juridical conception of governance that recognises and is commensurate with the rise of English liberalism. Norbert Elias’ The civilizing process The rediscovered sociological classic of Norbert Elias’ The Civilizing Process; ­Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations was originally published in G ­ erman in 1939 as Über den Prozess der Zivilisation in two volumes and not published in English until 1978 and 1982. It is the acclaimed text that attempts to explain how Europeans came to think of themselves as more civilized than past or other societies. Elias’ analysis of the civilizing process explained how changing conceptions of manners, especially shame and embarrassment, were related to larger international forces in Europe governing the struggle for power and security with the birth of sovereign states. Generational changes in social behaviour from the thirteenth until the eighteenth centuries in ‘manners’ (or etiquette) relates social attitudes and organisation to state formation –a decline in intra-state conflict as the state assumed a monopoly on violence allowing people to become more interconnected and able to enjoy the fruits of trade and services. It was this ethos of growing mutual dependence and benefit with fellow citizens only encountered at a distance that established rules of interaction and complex patterns of self-restraint. Elias held that European civilization was an improvement on the forms of barbarism which it replaced. In the first volume Elias observes changes in the behaviour of the secular upper classes in the west commenting on the ‘Sociogenesis of the Antithesis between Kultur and Zivilisation in German’ with examples of courtly attitudes of the court nobility in Germany before examining the ‘Sociogenesis of the Concept of Civilisation in France’ including Physiocratism and the French Reform Movement. ‘Civilization’ is considered as a specific transformation of human behaviour and Elias briefly provides a history of the concept of civilité from whence the English word ‘civilization’ comes. He also examines medieval manners including ‘Behaviour at Table’, that is so-called table manners, and the rise and decline of concepts of courtoisie and civilité. Civilizing of eating habits such as eating meat, using a knife and fork, also help to make distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour that embraced attitudes to natural functions such as blowing one’s nose and splitting as well as changes in attitudes to relations between men and women, especially in relation to aggression and the life of a knight.

Western civilization 101  17

The second volume focuses on state formation and civilization with reference to feudal society and state formation with a set of observations on the rise of the absolute state and its power dynamics and attention direction to new elements in the structure of medieval society as compared with Antiquity. Elias examines the first stage of the rising monarchy focused on competition and monopolization within a territory while acknowledging differences between England, France and Germany, and finally, the last stages of the free competitive monopoly of the state and its balance of power with the formation of a central ‘Royal Mechanism’ and the monopoly of taxation. He provides a synopsis of a theory of the civilizing processes focused on the spread of selfconstraint with ‘Courtization of the Warriors’ and ‘The Muting of Drives’, including the psychologization and rationalization shame and repugnance. It is a masterwork and once rediscovered in the 1980s become the theoretical marker for civilizational studies which had been dominated by the debate on Kultur and Zivilisation in nineteenth century and early twentieth-century Germany drawing on the false distinction between ‘community’ as a natural living organism and ‘society’ as a mechanical aggregation (Tönnies, 1963). With Zivilization referring to an open and pluralist culture it became possible to talk as Spengler does of the decline of culture.4 Civilization as a pedagogical concept In the postwar period civilization studies emerged as a major pedagogical concept in the US. As Gilbert Allardyce (1982, p. 695) remarked: ‘The rise of ‘Western Civ’ is one of the great success stories in the history of the historical profession in America. For a time between the First World War and the campus protests of the 1960s, all roads led to the Western Civ course’ dominating the college curriculum. Civilization courses were offered on campus with a study abroad option throughout the US. As the University of Chicago College course program puts it, the emphasis is on ‘the ideas, cultural patterns, and social pressures that frame the understanding of events and institutions within a civilization’ with a sequence that explores ‘the dynamics of conquest, slavery, colonialism, and their reciprocal relationships with concepts such as resistance, freedom, and independence, with an eye toward understanding their interlocking role in the making of the modern world.’5 The formulation of program goes back to the 1950s when Robert Redfield, the anthropologist and ethnolinguist, as Dean of Social Sciences developed the Comparative Civilizations project. The emphasis was on Western Civilization with a focus on America; the study of non-Western civilizations was added somewhat later. Many such courses were first developed in the 1920s by US universities and later introduced elsewhere in the Western world, although recently there has been kick-back by students and staff that these ‘great book’ courses promote a ‘Western supremacist’ perspective,6 and are becoming less popular as with the growth of Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Indigenous Studies since the

18  Michael A. Peters

1970s. This reflected a political change away from the Western Civ curriculum. In 1988 The New York Times ran the story ‘In Dispute on Bias, Stanford Is Likely to Alter Western Culture Program’7 reporting students protested that undergraduates had to take ‘a course in Western Civilization, which they denounced as Eurocentric, white-male indoctrination’. This was one of the protests that began the canon wars and setting off a multiculturalist movement away from Western Civilization courses based on the argument ‘that Western Civilization was a myth concocted in the 1910s aimed at assimilating immigrant minorities and justifying American imperialism – multiculturalists argued for a broader, richer presentation of peoples and traditions’ (Bauerlein, 2020). Thus began the decades of the culture wars. Stanley Kurtz (2020) of The National Association of Scholars (NAS), produced The Lost History of Western Civilization. The NAS is a politically conservative advocacy group opposed to political correctness on A ­ merican campuses, originally set up in 1987 with the goal of preserving Western intellectual heritage and upholding the standards of a liberal arts curriculum ‘that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship’.8 Embodying this general framework, Kurtz (2020) argues: The Western tradition is the source of America’s founding principles and constitutional system. That is the most important reason for civic minded citizens to study it. And while America has been shaped by the particularities of Western civilization, the liberal principles nurtured by this tradition represent our best hope for national reconciliation across boundaries of race, ethnicity, and religion. This report can be read as an argument against those on either the right or the left who associate Western civilization with “white identity politics.” The distinctive idea that emerged in the West—to be taken up into what we used to call the American Creed—is that a polity based on the principles of liberty and equality belongs to all citizens, as individuals, regardless of race, faith, ethnicity, or national origin. This is the way out of the trap we have fallen into. How we lost our way is the subject of this report. (pp. 11–12) As Kurtz makes clear Western Civ courses were replaced by courses in world history that yielded to the concept of globalization, identifying the ‘radical skepticism of one generation’ driven by forces in the American academy that were ‘skeptical, relativist, historicist, and even nihilist in character’. Kurtz questions the idea that Western civilization is a modern invention, a thesis he lays at the door of Gilbert Allardyce and the multiculturalist, deconstructionist, and globalist historians that followed. The full argument emerges as summarized in four major propositions: 1) Postmodern academic skepticism, and the broader collapse of faith it reflects, has backed us into a corner in which inflated accusations of racism,

Western civilization 101  19

bigotry, and genocide are virtually the only remaining sources of collective purpose; 2) Postmodern academic skepticism has become a petrified ­orthodoxy every bit as due for critique as the Aristotelianism of Hobbes’s day; 3) So-called multiculturalism isn’t really about preserving traditional cultures at all—instead “multiculturalism” has ushered in a radically new sort of culture in which perpetually expanding accusations of racism, bigotry, and genocide stand as quasi-religious ends in themselves; and 4) The American experiment cannot survive without checking or reversing these trends. (p. 13) Kurtz wants to contest the thesis he attributes to Allardyce that the Western Civilization course is ‘a characteristically American invention’ with the intent of dislodging Allardyce’s historical evidence on the timing of the construction which is the thrust of Part One. Unfortunately, Kurtz wants to attribute the beginning of the decline of the pedagogical concept of Western Civ to postmodernism without much understanding of the claims he is making. I have attempted to investigate what I call ‘the neoconservative critique of the university’ and particularly the attack on multiculturalism and postmodernism that initiated the culture wars in the US by seeking to explain these developments by an analysis of the thought of the political philosopher Leo Strauss (1961, p. 140) who held the view that the crisis of liberalism was because it had abandoned its absolute foundation and became relativistic. US neoconservatism began as a label used to describe leftist New York intellectuals who had come to doubt their own political views and came to exhibit a revulsion of anticommunism abroad and the 1960s counterculture at home, and complained of the inability of the university as a liberal institution to resist the counterculture. They also came to picture themselves standing in a direct line to Leo Strauss ‘as the greatest American philosopher of classical political theory – a tradition that seeks above all a stable and ordered moral foundation based on American values against the forces of cultural anarchy and libertinism – America as the apex of civilization and defender of the western tradition’ (Peters & York, 2011, pp.  12–13). The first generation of neoconservative intellectuals, ­ included ­Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Patrick M ­ oynihan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Peter Berger, Nathan Glazer, E ­ dward Shils and S ­ eymour Martin Lipset many of whom flirted with Trotskyism and Marxism in the 1930s and 1940s, only to move to the right thereafter. They were strongly motivated by the question of values in relation to A ­ mericanism, to American identity and the American way of life. Later, they also held to the a­ ssertion of America values over national interests in foreign policy and national security (p. 13). The second generation of neoconservatives, (including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle), were students of Albert Wohlstetter and Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago, both of whom were Leo Strauss’s students. Francis Fukuyama was Bloom’s student. The neocons were big on American civilizational values but seemingly immune to the question of civilizational decline which displayed

20  Michael A. Peters

itself in the historical revisionism in relation to the war in Vietnam and for going to war in Iraq. Francis Fukuyama (2006) in America at the Crossroads: Democracy, power, and the neoconservative legacy details how his views deviated from that of his neoconservative associates Paul Wolfowitz, Albert Wohlstetter, Allan Bloom and William Kristol. The effects of the neoconservatives with its rewriting of history and the humanities finds its source in Strauss’ critique of radical historicism and his statement of the ‘theological-political problem’, a synthetic blending of ­Enlightenment reason and Jewish faith that Strauss developed as a model to guide modern Judaism and politics through Nietzsche’s problem of nihilism and the relativity of all values (Peters & York, 2011). Shadia Drury’s (1999) Leo Strauss and the American Right exposed the links between the American neocons and Strauss, and the efforts of Straussians in Washington to stop the cultural and social disintegration of America caused by liberal values and the move away from the wisdom of the ancients even if it meant the adoption of Plato’s ‘noble lie’. What was required to halt the moral slide was a return to the ancients and to the Great Books of the Western tradition that would help us to return to the good life, to a philosophical way of life and to Plato’s political philosophy. It is on the basis of this reading of Strass and his influence on those who sought to established the absolute values of American civilization anchored in Plato’s philosophy and Strauss’s esoteric pedagogical reading of strategic texts that it is possible to understand Allan Bloom (1987) and the culture wars that ensued during the 1980s. In short as I argued some time ago: ‘Bloom, a protégé of Leo Strauss, friend and colleague of Lynne Cheney, chair of the US National Endowment for the Humanities, pictured themselves as seekers of truth against the cultural ravages of postmodern relativism’ (Peters, 2008, p. 13) and, ultimately, an engagement and rejection of Nietzsche’s and ­Heidegger’s historicism. As Neil Robertson (1998) points out: Like Nietzsche and Heidegger, Strauss sees that the West is in the grip of a profound spiritual crisis. And following Nietzsche and Heidegger, Strauss sees that this crisis itself opens up the possibility of a release from modernity. This release both brings to light a principle that is beyond, but forgotten by, modernity, and points to a return to origins, free from and prior to the sources of modernity. (cited in Peters, 2008) Kurtz’s (2020) The Lost History of Western Civilization clearly indicates that the contest over the notion of western civ as both a pedagogical concept but also a reading of western philosophy is far from over. By contrast, to Kurtz I want to anchor western civilization in the Enlightenment tradition and its critique, and in the tradition of modern western philosophy that is best expressed in the evolution of civitas and civilité as the development of civil society. To my mind even with all its problems this holds a critical contribution to the

Western civilization 101  21

emergence of global civil society where the original concepts are extended and developed to include an ethics of the other. The unseemly and tragic end of the Afghan War after twenty long years, when Afghan-trained forces were overrun in a week, a war reputedly costing $2.3 trillion and over 240,000 deaths, has been interpreted by some scholars in the discourse of ‘declinism’, as the end of the American Empire. Notes 1 Type V (Multiverse) civilization and Type IV, capable of controlling space/time, in the realms of pure speculation have also been suggested, e.g. https://medium. com/swlh/comparing-different-civilizational-scales-35e98ee30c93 2 ‘The scale starts at 106 bits and assigns this the letter A. At every increase of order of magnitude this letter is increased: 107:B, 108:C, …, 10³¹:Z.’ Simon Håkansson suggests we might reach R by 2020. ‘According to an analysis conducted by the International Data Corporation (IDC) in 2013 humanity will have generated 44 Zettabytes of data by 2020[2]. 44 Zettabytes is equal to 3.52 × 10²³ bits. This leaves us at R in the Information Mastery scale—ten paces away from the H we were at in 1973’, https:// www.quora.com/Where-are-we-on-Carl-Sagans-Information-Mastery-scale 3 See also https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/ 2021/05/4-april-1979-foucault-on-civil-society-ep-xxxix.html 4 https://www.resetdoc.org/intercultural-lexicon/culture-civilisation/AlessandroFerrara; see alsohttps://rfkclassics. blogspot.com/2019/03/classics-culture-­ civilization-oh-my.html, Rebecca Futo Kennedy. 5 http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/civilizationstudies/. This course offered Introduction to the Civilizations of East Asia I, II & III; Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations I–II; Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization; Introduction to African Civilization I–II–III; History of European Civilization I–II–III; America in World Civilization I–II–III; Introduction to ­Russian Civilization I–II–III; Ancient Mediterranean World I–II–III; Human Rights in World Civilizations I–II; Jewish Civilization I–II–III; Introduction to Latin American Civilization I–II–III; Music in Western Civilization I–II; Ancient Near Eastern History and Society I–II–III; Ancient Near Eastern Thought and Literature I–II– III; Ancient Empires I–II–III; Semitic Languages, Cultures, and Civilizations I–II– III; Islamic History and Society I–II–III; Islamic Thought and Literature I–II–III; Introduction to the Civilizations of South Asia I–II. 6 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/18/tensions-growaustralia-over-courses-western-civilization 7 https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/19/us/in-dispute-on-bias-stanford-islikely-to-alter-western-culture-program.html 8 https://www.nas.org/about-us

Orcid Michael Peters iD http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1482-2975

References Allardyce, G. (1982). The rise and fall of the western civilization course. The American Historical Review, 87(3), 695–725. https://doi.org/10.2307/1864161

22  Michael A. Peters Bauerlein, M. (2020). What took the place of western civ? Inside higher education. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/02/19/how-revisionwestern-civ-curriculum-resulted-no-curriculum-all-opinion Bloom, A. (1987). The closing of the American mind. Simon & Schuster. Drury, S. (1999). Leo strauss and the American right. Palgrave Macmillan. Ellul, J. (1980). The technological system. Translated from the French by Joachim Neugroschel. Continuum. Ferguson, A. (1767). An essay on the history of civil society (5th ed.). T. Cadell, 1782. https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/ferguson-an-essay-on-the-history-of-civil-society Foucault, M. (2008). In The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the collège de France, 1978– 1979 (Arnold I. Davidson, Ed., Graham Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave. Fukuyama, F. (2006). America at the crossroads: Democracy, power, and the neoconservative legacy. Yale University Press. Kaku, M. (2006). Parallel worlds: A journey through creation. Anchor Books. Kardashev, N. (1964). Transmission of information by extraterrestrial civilizations. ­Soviet Astronomy, 8, 217–221. Kurtz, S. (2020). The lost history of western civilization. The National Association of Scholars. Retrieved from https://www.nas.org/storage/app/media/Reports/Lost %20Histor y%20of%20Western%20Civ/The%20Lost%20Histor y%20of%20 Western%20Civilization.pdf Lemarchand, G. A. (1992). Detectability of extraterrestrial technological activities. Retrieved from http://www.coseti.org/lemarch1.htm. Nicolet, C. (1980). In. The world of the citizen in republican Rome (P. S. Falla, Trans., pp. 21–23). University of California Press. Peters, M. A. (2008). Leo strauss and the neoconservative critique of the liberal university: Postmodernism, relativism and the culture wars. Critical Studies in Education, 49(1), 11–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508480701813524 Peters, M. A., & Besley, T. (2016). ‘We never expel a foreigner’ – Globalism, interconnectivity and the experiment of the open society. Geopolitics, History and International Relations, 8(2), 112–126. Peters, M. A., & York, J. G. (2011). Introduction: Leo strauss: Reading Between the lines. In J. G. York, & M. A. Peters (Eds.), Leo strauss, education and political thought (pp. 9–19). Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Robertson, N. (1998). The closing of the early modern mind: Leo Strauss and early modern political thought. Retrieved December 21, 2007, from www.mun.ca/animus/ 1998vol3/robert3.htm. Shin, J., Price, M. H., Wolpert, D. H., Shimao, H., Tracey, B., & Kohler, T. A. (2020). Scale and information-processing thresholds in holocene social evolution. Nature Communications, 11(1):2394. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16035-9 Tönnies, F. (1963). Community and society. Trans. Charles P Loomis. Harper & Row, [1887].

Chapter 2

Civilizational collapse, eschatological narratives and apocalyptic philosophy Michael A. Peters

COVV: I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit. (Pause.) It’s easy going. (Pause.) When I fall I’ll weep for happiness. (Pause. He goes towards door.) HAMM: Clov! (Clov halts, without turning.) Nothing. (Clov moves on.) Clov! (Clov halts, without turning.) CLOV:  This is what we call making an exit. Samuel Beckett, Endgame: A Play in One Act [http://www.ricorso.net/rx/library/authors/classic/ Beckett_S/Endgame.htm] The West has been dominated by a powerful program that was also an untransgressible contract among discourses of the end. The theme of the end of philosophy represent only the most comprehensive, massive and gathered forms of this. Derrida, J. (1984) of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy. Trans. John P. Leavey Jr., Oxford Literary Review, 6: 2: 3–37.

Historiography and the decline of Western civilization The idea of the decline of the West has been around for centuries buried deeply in Christian theology and historiography. One major variant, turning Hegel on his head, views the decline of the West as part of the dialectic with the rise of Asia. Oswald Spengler’s (1918, 1922) The Downfall of the Occident, a two-volume work comprised Form and Actuality (1918) and Perspectives of World History (1922), involved a rejection of the Eurocentric view of history as a linear division into periods (ancient/medieval/modern) to understand civilizational decline in terms of cultures considered as organic entities that lasted approximately 1000 years. He recognises eight cultures–Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mayan-Aztec, Classical, Arab and Western–that develop organically reaching the status of a ‘civilization’ only in the final stage. Spengler writes that the Western world is ending. The West has entered the final stage of our ‘Faustian culture’. In this vision Spengler is hugely influenced

DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895-3

24  Michael A. Peters

by Goethe and Nietzsche. According to Spengler, Goethe lived in the Olympian age while Nietzsche, who lived a century later, experienced what it was like to live in a century of a ‘cultureless civilization’—a conception that Wittgenstein embraced from Spengler to indicate how much he detested living in a scientific American civilization without culture.1 As Spengler (1924) puts it in his essay ‘Nietzsche and His Century’: ‘Goethe lived at a time filled with respect for form; Nietzsche longed desperately for forms that had been shattered and abandoned’.2 Civilization is what a culture becomes once it has become exhausted. Gibbons’ the decline and fall of Rome Westerners might be forgiven for thinking that their ‘world’ – the world created through Western colonialism, imperialism, industrialism and digital capitalism – might suddenly collapse much as the Roman Empire collapsed. But the fall of Rome was actually a slow and complex process of westward tribal migration with devastating incursions that began when the Huns, a nomadic people from Central Asia, invaded from the north, conquering the Goths to live on the Volga in 370 AD. They made devastating raids on the Eastern Empire and invaded Gaul in 451. The Huns were followed by other ­Germanic tribes such as the Vandals, the Burgundians and the Gepidae, pushing other tribes onto the Roman border defences during the fourth century (from roughly 376BC) of the Western Empire. The break-up of the Western Empire accelerated after the evacuation of Britannia by the Roman legion in 406 AD when the Anglo-Saxons began to settle in Britain from 450 AD. For the first time in 800 years, Rome was sacked, falling to the Visigoths in AD 410 under their leader Alaric, although by that time it was no longer the capital of the Western Empire. Rome has been sacked four times: the young city was sacked first by the Gauls in the fourth century BC, followed by the Visigoths in 410 AD, the Vandals in 455 AD, and the Ostrogoths in 547. (The city was also sacked later by the Normans in 1084 and by the Holy Roman Empire in 1527). After four centuries of contact with the imperial power from the first century, the Germanic tribes had improved their military technology to the point of being able to challenge Rome. They had learned from the new technology of war. The fall of the city of Rome and the Western Empire did not put an end to the entire Roman Empire. The Eastern (Byzantine) Empire survived for another thousand years. In the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Gibbon writes: ‘The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness…. The story of its ruin (downfall) is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long’. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire is now the classic paradigm case in western historiography concerning the causes for the collapse of civilization in general with a distinguished line

Civilizational collapse, eschatological narratives  25

of historical commentary that dates from before Edward Gibbon’s (1766) account in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire of a loss of civic virtue to Arnold J. Toynbee’s explanation of the decay of republican institutions from their inception.3 Gibbon’s magisterial six volumed work was published in the period 1776 to 1789 in which he advances the thesis that foreign legions ‘acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries’ and ‘oppressed the freedom of the republic’. His massive study as he says in the Preface begins with ‘The Extent and Military Force of the Empire in the Age of the Antonines’ in the years 98–180 and ended with an examination of the ‘Four Causes of Decay and Destruction’ and the ruins of Rome in the fifteenth century. He divides the history into three periods. First, ‘the age of Trajan and the Antonines’ which represented the height of Rome’s power and showed the first signs of decline with ‘the subversion of the Western Empire’ by ‘barbarians of Germany and Scythia’ ‘subjected Rome to the power of a Gothic conqueror’, a period completed by the beginning of the sixth century. Second, ‘commence[s] with the reign of Justinian, who, by his laws, as well as by his victories, restored a transient splendour to the Eastern Empire’ to ‘the elevation of Charlemagne, who, in the year eight hundred, established the second, or German Empire of the West’. Third, a period of six and a half centuries ‘from the revival of the Western Empire, till the taking of Constantinople by the Turks’. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall has since created its own historiography and shaped a tradition of criticism that questions the historical veracity and sources of Gibbon’s account but also led to a range of different approaches that attempt to relativise Gibbon’s view to the intellectual and material contexts of the eighteenth century. Dimitrie Cantemir’s work predated that by Gibbon and he was an important contributor to the Decline and Fall tradition. Cantemir (1673–1723), born in Moldavia, was a polymath – a philosopher, historian, musician and linguist who spoke eleven languages. As an Orientalist he wrote the influential work History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire (1734) that circulated in Europe in manuscript form before being published in London. It was referenced by Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Berlin in 1714. The work enjoyed wide readership and was translated into Russian at the request of Peter the Great in 1721 and soon after he began work on the history of Romania (Dutu & Cernovodeanu, 1973). J. G. A. Pocock (1977; 2007; 2009), the historian of political thought, relates Gibbon’s work to the world view of the eighteenth century and Enlightenment perceptions of modernity and to the historiography of a variety of Enlightenment biographical, geographical and intellectual contexts, including those authors who influenced Gibbon – Voltaire, Hume, Robertson, Ferguson and Adam Smith. Pocock maintains that Gibbon in particular embraced Voltaire’s narrative of the history of manners as a means of understanding. By contrast, Arnaldo Momigliano (1959/60) suggests that

26  Michael A. Peters

‘Historians, theologians, and political theorists have meditated on the decline and fall of Rome for centuries’ and notes that ‘Mircea Eliade rightly observed that the Romans were continuously obsessed by the “end of Rome”’. He writes ‘The thought of reviving old Rome, old classical civilization, became the inspiration of the humanistic movement in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’ suggesting the ‘problem of the decline of Rome is a product of Italian humanism’. He indicates that the Italian humanist Flavio Biondo dated the decline of Rome from the sacking of Rome in 410 by the Gothic barbarians. By subtle analysis Montesquieu showed two of the main reasons for the fall of ancient Rome. There is an anti-Christian note in Montesquieu [1734] which becomes loud in Voltaire and loudest of all in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Gibbon focused attention on Christianity as the main factor of change and… of decadence in the structure of the Roman empire. It was not until the nineteenth century that the German invasions came to be generally regarded as the key to understanding of end of old Rome. Momigliano draws a direct relation between the triumph of Christianity and the decline of the Roman empire. Writing at the beginning of the 1960s Momigliano suggested there was no history of the impact of Christianity on the structure of pagan society: ‘Christianity produced a new style of life, created new loyalties, gave people new ambitions and new satisfactions’. While the Roman Empire ‘became increasingly rigid, unimaginative, and unsuccessful, the Church was mobile and resilient and provided space for those whom the State was unable to absorb’ (see also Momigliano (2013)). Mentioning Monasticism that undermined Roman civilization, he writes The process of romanizing the barbarians by christianizing them is an essential feature of the history of the Roman empire between Constantine and Justinian. If it did not save the empire, at least in the West, it saved many features of Roman civilization. Christianity was already more dynamic and efficient than the Empire in the fourth century. The Christians were more adaptable at dealing with the barbarians. Yet as Scuralli (2018) argues where Gibbons argues that Christianity caused the Empire decline, the Ostrogothic and Frankish kingdoms managed ‘to fuse Roman culture and Christian customs with their own traditions to give themselves legitimacy and continue the traditions of the past’.4 Generations of historians have used Gibbon’s ‘decline and fall’ as a model to criticise or modify, and many historians and others, including King George,

Civilizational collapse, eschatological narratives  27

have applied Gibbon’s insights to the British Empire and its decline. Gibbons’ history became essential reading for British imperialists from Burke to Macauley. British historians had to confront the idea that in Rome’s Fall was also a premonition for the British Empire centring on the concept of the First British Empire (before 1780), the Second British Empire (1783–1815) based on colonisation and the constitutional relationship with its colonies with the American colonies and a group self-governing territories in Asia and the Pacific under the policy of free trade, and in the Third imperialistic phase (1815–1914) nineteenth century in the scramble for Africa. The period of decline was associated with decolonisation and the rise of nationalist movement saw a steady decline of empire after 1945. Many historians looked to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall as the historical standard bearer for the decline of the British Empire with much critical scholarship directed at the origins and the decline and fall (Brendon, 2007; Canny, 1998; Ferguson, 2004) though some saw an ‘unfinished empire’ and its global expansion (Darwin, 2012). Following the process of decolonisation in the immediate postwar era, it was only in the 1980s that Canada, Australia, and New Zealand severed their constitutional links with Britain, only to resurrect the Commonwealth a voluntary association of 54 countries, home to 2.5 billion people, supported by an intergovernmental network. Britain has not collapsed and its Brexit and AUKUS pact with the US and Australia indicates aspiration of being a global science superpower (Peters, 2021). Civilizational studies A recent feature on BBC Future indicates that the average lifespan of a civilization is 336 years. Collapse may be quick but it may not necessarily be abrupt nor final. There are examples of societies being absorbed into another culture or incorporated into a political territory. Some societies experience a process of disintegration, others a slow decline; others are conquered, and become formally an administrative division of a larger empire as vassal states. Other states or empires reappear in a different form changing from empire or civilization to nation-state and global superpower. New societies sometimes arise from the ashes of old civilizations through revolutionary change and the total collapse and extinction of a culture is not inevitable; often stripped-down versions of past empires survive most often in religious or cultural organisations and traditions that reduce the complexity but enhances the technological base. Kemp Luke (2019), a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, remarks ‘Our deep past is marked by recurring failure’ and indicates that he is interested in the question of ‘why collapse occurs through a historical autopsy. What can the rise and fall of historic civilisations tell us about our own? What are the forces that precipitate or delay a collapse? And do we see similar patterns today?

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The study of the rise and fall of historic civilisations may be useful in hypothesizing underlying forces of decline including geopolitical overreach and even moral decline (although this surely needs a little philosophy as well?) but many if not most commentators suggest we face a different kind of collapse which is not civilizational in the sense of belonging to one cultural entity but rather a global ecological collapse driven by global warming in the Anthropocene. This really is not a question of the rise and fall of historic civilisations. It is also very different from the East/West dialectical narrative. The global collapse is controlled by the logic of the civilizational concept, although civilizational environmental aesthetic values such as balance and harmony may also be relevant. Global collapse is a different order again, and is not primarily historical: rather it belongs to the logic of science and ecology, to concepts of ‘carrying capacity’, population pressure, industrial capitalism, and to the sustainability of ecosystems. While civilizational analysis is useful

Civilizational collapse, eschatological narratives  29

it is subsumed by the larger question of global ecological collapse that is not determined by US-China, or the East/West dialectic of contemporary history. Now that the US is no longer the sole hegemon or superpower and the world order has given way to a multipolar world dominated by trade rather than military dominance, the fate of the world is determined by the coordination of multilateralism across different political systems. Critical in this regard is the influence of the most populated countries, India and China, but also their positionality within the wider international system. Apocalyptic works in the Western tradition Hegel’s lectures on history, Gibbon’s Fall and Decline, and Spengler’s The Decline of the West are the outstanding apocalyptic works of the western historiographical tradition. They are deeply structured narratives that contain an apocalyptic analysis of Western civilization, reflecting on its origins and also with a strong sense of prophecy reflect on its future. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries philosophers like Herder, Kant, Hegel, Ranke, and Marx provided a sense of historical optimism with the passage to a new stage or condition that represented an end-state, moral perfectibility and economic equality and well-being. There were others that saw the dark side of the Enlightenment, or a different Enlightenment, and critiqued Enlightenment assumptions to emphasise the end of Western civilization. The tradition of Continental philosophy continued in different ways by Goethe and Nietzsche but also including Burkhardt and Spengler helping to shape the discourse of history. Hegel’s concept of the dialectic, originally a form of argument advancing though the logic of negation and counter-arguments in Greek classical philosophy with the method of elechus, becomes motive force of history – thesisantithesis-synthesis – as the basis for various forms of dialectical materialism and naturalism. Hegel traces the dialectic from the Pre-socratic philosopher Parmenides, through Socrates and Plato to Immanuel Kant. The western dialectic has parallels in other cultures. Dialectic as the force of opposition based on the negative as a logical operator is an important basis for thought in general as the law of non-contradiction shows. The logic of dissent with its linguistic cognates including ‘disagreement’ and ‘opposition’ is part of the logic of negation that serves as a condition of discourse (Peters, 2016). In this regard the history of dissent and dissidence in its first wave of global protest with the development of new social movements and the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s, has encouraged a new a wave of global protest tied to the ecological survival of humanity, new forms of civic engagement and disobedience around the consequences of western modernity and the necessity for sustainability. The dialectic is rooted in Chinese culture in the Yin and Yang model of thinking that is fundamental to Chinese cosmology and philosophy that

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present both naturalistic and optimistic attitudes about the world. Mao’s dialectical materialism registers both western and Chinese notions of the dialectic with references in his work to Confucian and Neo-Confucian writings and Daoist and Mohist writings. Apocalyptic endings of ‘the flood’ are prevalent in the Epic of Gilgamesh (1500BC), also in the Quran and the Hindu Dharmasastra where an ark, like in the Noah scriptural narrative, is advised by Vishnu. Apocalyptic literature is a narrative genre of prophetical writing in the western tradition is a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition and developed from early apocalyptic Jewish works that dated from about 200 BCE to about 165 BCE and was practised by millennialist early Christians with references in the Old Testament and the New Testament’s Book of Revelation which is full of both prophecies of destruction and the revelation of a new vision of Heaven and Earth where justice prevails. As one site on ‘Apocalyptic literature’ maintains: An apocalypse is a literary report of an amazing, often fearful, violent vision that reveals truths about past, present, and/or future times in highly symbolic and poetical terms. The writer may represent himself as being transported into a heavenly realm, or the vision may be unveiled—and even interpreted—by an angelic messenger. Apocalyptic exhortations are aimed at chastening and reforming their hearers with promises of rewards and punishment in the coming ‘end times’.5 It is not surprising that many fundamentalist Christians, Jews and Muslims see apocalyptic visions in the Covid-19 pandemic. As Crossley (2021) argues the COVID crisis of 2020–2021 has recharged apocalypticism and changed the ways the Bible is understood understood in mainstream political discourses including ‘the use of apocalyptic themes in relation to QAnon and conspiracy theories, ready-made ironic language to describe lockdown, radical social transformation, and constructing political positions outside the traditional liberal consensus’. Apocalyptic narratives are written as ‘resistance literature’ based on persecution and despair, and a future vision that delivers from the present age dominated by evil forces to a positive coming age brought about by divine intervention. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a genre of science fiction where civilization is collapsing through some momentous event such as climate change and the collapse of the ecological system, nuclear holocaust, pandemic, alien invasion or technological singularity. Today, it could be argued, we are witnessing the convergence of multiple eschatological narratives—theological, historical, scientific and ecological—that concern the prophecy of the end of the world and the extinction of humankind. It is a theological doctrine concerned with the ‘end-times’, that bespeaks the destiny of humanity – death, the Second Coming, and the Last Judgment – transcribed into the scientific discourse of global ecological collapse.

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These ‘endings’ and intimations also have their source in philosophy and the philosophy of religion. ‘An apocalyptic tone in philosophy’ Derrida (1984) called attention ‘an apocalyptic tone in philosophy’ and the eschatological trope of the end of philosophy, a trope developed in different ways by Nietzsche, Marx, and Heidegger. Recognizing and working with ideas from Blanchot, Levinas and Benjamin, Derrida seeks a messianic structure of the future of the ‘new international’ that also might be thought today in term of a political multilateralism that replaces the US as the world’s sole superpower. Apokalupto was a good word for the Greek gala: ‘I disclose, I uncover, I unveil the thing that can be part of the body, the head or the eyes, a secret part, the sex or whatever might be hidden…’ (p. 12) He argues ‘Among the numerous traits characterizing and apocalyptic type of writing, let us provisionally isolate prediction and eschatological preaching, the fact of telling, foretelling, or preaching the end, the extreme limit, the imminence of the last’ (p. 43). His discussion of Kant as someone who speaks of marking the limit to a certain kind of metaphysics, ‘frees another eschatological wave of philosophical discourses’ (p. 20), He notes that the west has been dominated by discourse of the end including the end of history and the death of philosophy. There are obvious differences between Hegelian and Nietzschean eschatologies (‘between the last man and the higher man and the overlord’) and the eschatology of Marxism, as well as other varieties – an endless series of variations of the end of history, the end of class struggle, the end of philosophy, the death of philosophy, the end of religions, the end of Christianity and morals (that was the most serious naivete), the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse Now, I tell you, in the cataclysm, the fire, the blood, the fundamental earthquake, the napalm descending from the sky by helicopters, like prostitutes, and also the end of literature, the end of painting, art as a thing of the past, the end of psychoanalysis, the end of the university, the end of phallocentrism and phallogocentrism, and I don’t know what else? (p. 20) And he goes on to suggest ‘one great paradigm’ according to which all e­ schatological strategies would regulate themselves, a fundamental philosophical onto-eschato-teleological interpretation based on an apocalyptic tone that reveals the truth: ‘the end is soon, it is imminent, signifies the tone. I see it, I know it, I tell you, now you know, come’ (p. 53). It is in the same vein that Derrida annopuces the end of the humanities and proposes ‘tasks for the new humanities’ (Derrida, 2005; Trifonas & Peters, 2005). Like Heidegger, ­Nietzsche and Wittgenstein before him, Jacques Derrida has called attention

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to the form of philosophical discourse – its ‘modes of composition, its rhetoric, its metaphors, its language, its fictions’, as he says – not in order to assimilate philosophy to literature but rather to recognise the complex links between the two and to investigate the ways in which the institutional authority of academic philosophy, and the autonomy it claims, rest upon a ‘disavowal with relation to its own language’. Derrida’s work reflects and engages with the tradition of Western metaphysics going back to Plato promoting an understanding of the critique of phallogocentrism as a response to the Western metaphysical tradition. Deconstruction, going beyond Abbau and Destruktion, works to undo ‘the metaphysics of presence’ which holds that thought and speech (the logos) is the privileged center through which all discourse and meaning are derived. Gott ist tot (‘God is dead’) is the shorthand that Nietzsche uses to proclaim this deepening of humanism. ‘God is dead’ as Heidegger (1985, p. 475) argues ‘has nothing to do with the assertion of an ordinary atheism. It means: The supersensible world, more especially the world of the Christian God, has lost its effective force in history’. Derrida as profound humanist is someone who directly and systematically deals with the question of humanism – what it is to be human and its limits and boundaries in technology and animality – and with its continuance through some means. A continuance is sought through its encompassing of new extensions and mutations of rights in international law, in democracy to come, in the right to philosophise, in the author/writer/reader, in tasks for the new humanities, in an ethics of the Other – of hospitality – in the changed conditions for scholarship and media, in providing an alternative vision for world institutions and the governance of globalisation (Trifonas & Peters, 2005). Wittgenstein is another anti-foundationalist philosopher who can be seen in relation to the ‘end of philosophy’ as a form of analysis that can reveal the true grammatical form of the proposition, that is, an end to philosophy as the pursuit of foundations that characterise the modern era. By contrast, he advances a therapeutic anti-foundationalist form of anti-philosophy that treats the search for certainty and ultimate grounds as a metaphysical illness. For Wittgenstein there are no ultimate grounds or reasons – that is a depth illusion even in Freud’s analysis – there are only forms of life and the groundless ‘giving’ of grounds. Working with Jim Marshall I interpret Wittgenstein in terms of postmodern philosophy and poststructuralism as part of the apocalyptic philosophical literature. In Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Postmodernism, Pedagogy (Peters & Marshall, 1999) we examine the parallels between the later Wittgenstein and French poststructuralism to investigate the direct appropriation of Wittgenstein’s work by poststructuralists. We present these ‘apocalyptic philosophers’ as facing the most pressing problems facing philosophy and education in the postmodern condition: ethico-political lines of inquiry after the collapse of the grand narratives, other cultures in the curriculum, and the notion of postmodern science.

Civilizational collapse, eschatological narratives  33

Wittgenstein read Nietzsche and that he grew up in the company of intellectuals strongly influenced by Nietzsche, including the musician Gustav Mahler and the painter Gustav Klimt, both of whom were regular visitors to the Wittgenstein family mansion. Wittgenstein was also influenced by the Nietzschean, Oswald Spengler, and both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (perhaps more so than any other two modern philosophers) were strongly influenced by Schopenhauer. Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘philosopher of the future’ expresses the principal concern for the health of culture and the responsibility of the philosopher for the project of cultivation and education of humanity as a whole. The philosopher-physician does not create cultural health by treating the ‘sick’ individual by enhancing her rational autonomy because the cultural malady is not primarily a cognitive disorder which, thus, can be cured by the cultivation of reason. Rather, the philosopher of the future employs all the cultural resources at his or her disposal to promote what we are capable of becoming. Wittgenstein ascribes to a similar romantic view of culture as a form of life; culture as an expressive and natural force, one that begins in doing (rather than thinking), and can be judged in terms similar to the creation of a work of art. Wittgenstein also sees himself as a philosopher of culture and offers philosophy as a kind of therapy (Peters & Marshall, 1999). Wittgenstein’s response to the problem of rationality as set up by analytic philosophy was to dethrone dominant western scientific conceptions of it as the exemplification of rationality as its best by dissolving it in an anti-­ foundationalist constitutive conception – a set of practices of language-games (Peters, 2020). Wittgenstein was strongly influenced by Spengler from whom he may have taken the idea of family resemblance (von Wright) and embraced a similar view of the cultural decline of the west. Cavell (1988) maintains that in the Investigations Wittgenstein ‘diurnalizes Spengler’s vision of the destiny toward exhausted forms, toward nomadism, toward loss of culture, or of home, or community’ and in our philosophical wanderings Wittgenstein returns us again and again to the ‘everyday’ and ‘the ordinary’ as a means of dispelling the encounter with skepticism and to bring us to our senses. In The Last Book of Postmodernism (Peters, 2001) comprised of essays written on and about ‘postmodernism’ and education I attempt to treat the themes of religion and spiritualism to comprehend the ‘postmodern condition’ and the philosophical and historical influence of Nietzsche’s statement ‘God is dead’ and the meaning of the ‘end’ of Christendom. What is the prospect of global spirituality? An important part of my response is to argue that the ends of postmodernism gives way to ‘apocalyptic thinking’, a rethinking and reworking of ‘end-times’ narratives to realise that the ‘decline of the west’ does not mean the end of humanity, nor the end of the world. It may mean that the Western system as it evolved into liberal democracy and neoliberalism capitalism is counter-productive from the collective viewpoint; not the best global economic and political system to take us forward.

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Notes 1 ‘I realize then that disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current of European civilization and do not understand its goals’ (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 6). 2 http://home.alphalink.com.au/∼radnat/spengler/nietzschecentury.htm. 3 The Project Gutenberg eBook of The History of The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon. https://gutenberg.org/files/25717/25717h/25717-h.htm. 4 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/211520857.pdf. 5 https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Apocalyptic_literature.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

References Brendon, P. (2007). The decline and fall of the British empire, 1781–1997. Random House. Canny, N. (1998). The origins of empire, the Oxford history of the British empire (Vol. 1). Oxford University Press. Cavell, S. (1988). Declining decline: Wittgenstein as a philosopher of culture. Inquiry, 31(3), 253–264. https://doi.org/10.1080/00201748808602153 Crossley, J. (2021). The apocalypse and political discourse in an age of COVID. Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 44(1), 93–111. Darwin, J. (2012). Unfinished empire, the global expansion of empire. Penguin. Derrida, J. (1984). Of an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy, john p. Leavey jr. Oxford Literary Review, 6(2), 3–37. https://doi.org/10.3366/olr. 1984.001 Derrida, J. (2005). The future of the profession or the unconditional university (thanks to the ‘humanities’ what could take place tomorrow). In P. Trifonas & M. A. Peters (Eds.); P. Kamuf (Trans.), Deconstructing derrida: Tasks for the new humanities (pp. 11–24). Palgrave Macmillan. Dutu, A., & Cernovodeanu, P. (1973). Dimitrie Cantemir: Historian of South East European and oriental civilizations. Bucharest. Ferguson, N. (2004). Empire: The rise and demise of the british world order and the lessons for global power. Basic Books. Heidegger, M. (1985). Nietzsche’s word: “God is dead”. In The question concerning technology (D. Koblick, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. https://doi.org/10. 1177/0142064X211025464 Luke, K. (2019). Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? BBC. https://www.bbc. com/future/article/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse Momigliano, A. (1959/60). Christianity and the decline of the Roman empire. http:// mountainman.com.au/essenes/arnaldo%20momigliano%20intro.htm Momigliano, A. (2013). Gibbon from an Italian point of view. In Edward gibbon and the decline and fall of the Roman empire (G. W. Bowersock, Ed.). Harvard University Press.

Civilizational collapse, eschatological narratives  35 Peters, M. A. (2001). The last book of postmodernism. Peter Lang. Peters, M. A. (2016). Dissident thought: Systems of repression, networks of hope. Contemporary Readings in Law & Social Justice, 8(1), 20–36. Peters, M. A. (2020). Language-games philosophy: Language-games as rationality and method. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013 1857.2020.1821190 Peters, M. A. (2021). ‘Global Britain’: The China challenge and post-brexit Britain as a ‘science superpower’. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1–6. https://doi.org/10. 1080/00131857.2021.1951228 Peters, M. A., & Marshall, J. D. (1999). Wittgenstein: Philosophy, postmodernism, pedagogy. Bergin & Garvey. Pocock, J. G. A. (1977). Gibbon’s decline and fall and the world view of the late enlightenment. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10(3), 287–303. https://doi.org/10. 2307/2737901 Pocock, J. G. A. (2007). Perceptions of modernity in early modern historical thinking. Intellectual History Review, 17(1), 79–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17496970601140246 Pocock, J. G. A. (2009). gibbon and the invention of gibbon: Chapters 15 and 16 reconsidered. History of European Ideas, 35(2), 209–216. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. histeuroideas.2009.02.002 Scuralli, N. (2018). The significance of the Roman, germanic and christian foundations: How gibbon misunderstood the fall of the Roman West. Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (Theological Studies), Concordia University, Montreal. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/211520857.pdf Spengler, Oswald. (1991) The Decline of the West. Ed. Arthur Helps, and Helmut Werner. Trans. Charles F. Atkinson. Preface Hughes, H. Stuart. New York: Oxford UP. First published Vol 1 Form and Actuality, 1918 & Perspectives on World History, 1922. Spengler, Oswald (1924) Nietzsche and his century, https://www.scribd.com/ document/202059916/Oswald-Spengler-Nietzsche-His-Century Trifonas, P., & Peters, M. A. (Eds.). (2005). Deconstructing derrida: Tasks for the new humanities. Palgrave Macmillan. Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Culture and value (G. Von Wright, Ed.). Blackwell.

Chapter 3

‘Declinism’ and discourses of decline - the end of the war in Afghanistan and the limits of American power Michael A. Peters The end of the ‘forever war’ Taliban forces of 75,000 overran the well-equipped 300,000+ strong Afghan army, trained and supported by US-NATO military, in a world-shattering week that toppled the US Afghan client regime and bought to a historic close that era of neoconservative US foreign policy that symbolically began with 9/11 and the Global War on Terrorism. The event has been taken as further indicative evidence of the end of American Empire. The ignominious end of the Afghan War after twenty long years, often referred to as the ‘forever war’, was brought to an abrupt end by Joe Biden in such haste that it surprised everyone and caused a rift with NATO allies who wanted to stay a presence in Afghanistan. Whatever spin can be placed on the end of US involvement, the withdrawal was messy and unplanned, air lifting US troops and well over 120,000 Afghan US supporters from Kabul airport. Many more Afghans who were part of the US war effort remain trapped in the country. Even with American support, the Afghan army was routed in a week and the Afghan government also collapsed. The embattled president Ashraf Ghani fled the country reportedly with a ‘helicopter full of cash’.1 His swift departure left the best possible opening for the Taliban, who are talking of forming an ‘open, inclusive Islamic government’ and have established an interim government yet without the representation of women. President Biden first went on record as saying that nation-building was never part of the original mission yet the official justification for the Americans being in Afghanistan after the killing of Bin Laden had evaporated.2 Mission-creep set in with the downscaling US forces from 20,000 a couple of years ago to less than 2,000 in the final years. The thousands of defence contractors in Kabul indicated a massive privatisation (neoliberalisation) of US military effort including contracting-out of training, introduction of new AI weapon systems, military intelligence, coordination and logistical support. The coordination of the US mission had badly faltered; even US allies were not kept informed of the immediate withdrawal. Yet the scramble was poorly planned, no doubt also designed to avoid the possible embarassment of a massacre at Kabul airport. It might be argued that the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895-4

‘Declinism’ and discourses of decline  37

Marshall Plan, formally the European Recovery Program (1948–51), was by contrast ‘successful’: it transferred over US$13 billion for economic rebuilding of the economy aimed at establishing the free market to create a bulwark against communism in Europe. The global perception of US foreign policy indicated not only a global loss of face but also the recognition of problems with foreign policy transitions from Trump to Biden and a degree of confusion in the White House. Again, the truth of a poorly equipped indigenous enemy fighting for their own homeland against a technologically sophisticated world superpower has struck a chord. This has been an enduring lesson of US foreign policy since Vietnam. Biden tried a succession of excuses, most recently explaining that no longer is the US committed to the view that ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ can be installed through a military campaign, or against the collective will. It is clear that the Taliban now want to establish a government that is both representative and recognized by the rest of the world. China, Pakistan and Russia have already indicated a sympathetic reception of the Taliban government. The Taliban honoured their pledge not to attack and allowed US forces safe passage until the 31st August, 2021. Women’s rights and education for girls in Afghanistan will be the real litmus test on how far the Taliban has come into the twentieth century–a nonnegotiable issue with the West that the Taliban must register if it is to become a full world state with UN membership. The military evacuation, the largest since Dunkirk, could otherwise have been a blood bath. The establishment of an Islamic Republic in Afghanistan run through a form of democratic government is not what the US wanted but now it is here to stay for a while. Afghanistan, the so-called ‘graveyard of empires’, now returns to (a second) Taliban government, an Islamic Emirate, that may surprise us all. Already the regional land-bridge from China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran looks like a substantial BRI corridor. The Anglophone countries must really search for common ground with serious scrutiny of the version of Sharia law that the Taliban represents. Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan as a Deobandi religious-political revivalist movement within Sunni Islam has historic links to the Hanifi school, one of the four main schools of Islamic jurisprudence based on the work of Abu Hanifa in the eighth century.3 The end of the war in Afghanistan has significantly added to discourse that predicts the decline of the American Empire. One form of these ‘discourses of declinism’ is historical, after Edward Gibbon’s (1776-8) The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire which holds a central place in western historiography. It provides an account based on the loss of virtue by citizens and the hiring of mercenaries with some similarities to the tens of thousands of American and European defence contractors that vie for funds. But the decline Gibbon focuses on is not military overreach but moral decline. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is certainly pertinent as one of the very first historical accounts of the fall of a great power but ‘discourses of declinism’ are characteristic of

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Abrahamic eschatological narratives and apocalyptic cultures and since taken many other forms. Collapsology The discourse of collapsology is a scientific endeavour that utilises complexity theory with a transdisciplinary line of inquiry assessing the risks of the collapse of contemporary industrial society, including climate warming, mass extinctions, floods and fire, overpopulation, scarcity of resources, and the increasing frequency of natural disasters. It seems that the ‘end-times’ discourse of eschatological narratives common to a number of the world’s major religions has coalesced with scientific discourses based on ecological principles that began with The Club of Rome’s report Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens, 1972) and Paul Ehrlich (1968) Population Bomb. There were clear predecessors in Thomas Malthus and Karl Marx. Similar themes have been developed by Joseph Tainter’s (1988) The Collapse of Complex Societies that investigates past civilizations in terms of complexity theory, network theory and energy economics. He advances the idea that the ultimate explanation is an economic one based on diminishing returns on investments in social complexity. Jared Diamond’s (2005) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed broadened the debate focusing on environmental damage and climate change exacerbated by globalization and rapid population, confounded by poor political choices growth, that has hastened the risk of a global ecological collapse. Diamond (2005) defined collapse as ‘a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/ social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.’ He uses the ‘comparative method’ to examine ‘past and present societies that differed with respect to environmental fragility, relations with neighbors, political institutions, and other “input” variables postulated to influence a society’s stability’ (p. 8). This interdisciplinary field has addressed the problem of ‘growing systemic instabilities’ and the creation of a sustainable environment with the publication of Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens’ essay (2020) How everything can collapse: A manual for our times. Collapse is seen as a remote possibility: ‘we find it hard to face up to the very real possibility that these crises could produce a collapse of our entire civilization’. They argue ‘Collapse is the horizon of our generation. But collapse is not the end – it’s the beginning of our future.’ The Momentum Institute to which they belong investigates issues to do with the Anthropocene including the risk of collapse and degrowth policies. The institute was established in 2011 by Agnès Sinaï, a political ecologist and anti-­globalist journalist known for her trilogy Politics of the ­Anthropocene (2013, 2015, 2017). The best introduction to this emerging literature is the French humanities journal Cairn.info which published The Age of ­Catastrophe? (2020) with essays by François Hartog, Emmanuel

‘Declinism’ and discourses of decline  39

Hache, Pierre Charbonnier, Romain Noël and Gabriel Salerno, and the American philosopher Eugene Thacker. The issue begins: ‘Which term do you prefer? Apocalypse, catastrophe, collapse, or extinction? It’s just a matter of taste. For some years now, the fear of cataclysmic climate change has spawned a vast literature in the social sciences, and France has not stood on the sidelines. This dossier presents a broad overview of the main arguments put forward.’4 Eugene Thacker (2020) asked ‘Do you think people are wrong to focus on such issues as climate change and the sixth extinction?’ responds: On the one hand, I do think that the era we’re witnessing is unique in several respects. Global pandemics, state-of-exception quarantines, protests and rioting in the streets, food and resource insecurity, and Deep State Star Chamber conspiracies involving BSL-4 Labs, 5G, Big Pharma, chem trails, geoengineering, Soylent Green, and possibly even other-dimensional aliens. But on the other hand, I take a look at chronicles of the Black Death or the Great Plague of 1665 or the 1918 flu and wonder if this isn’t the same tired human drama being played out over and over again. If there is something unique about the “now,” perhaps it has to do with contradiction: a world view that demands a new logic, a logic of rifts, gaps, lacunae. On one side, an extensive world, a non-human world; on the other, an intensive world, a human world. On one side, a shifting climate and changing planet. On the other, a multitude of social media bubbles that serve as insulating echochambers for humans incessantly gazing at themselves.5 More pragmatically, I would argue that we must all become more aware scientifically of characteristics of collapse of complex ecosystems and it global characteristic and dimensions. I am inclined to follow the likes of Melinda Pálinkás (2018) who reviews the characteristics of collapsing ecosystems: The synergistic effects of direct human perturbations and climate change have been causing the mass extinction of species. The current extinction rate is about 100–1000 times the background rate. The local biodiversity intactness in terrestrial ecosystems is perhaps already beyond the planetary boundary on more than half of the world’s land surface [1]. About 70% of the forests are within 1 km of the forest edges, which reduces biodiversity by 10–70% [2]. According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species [3], 10–30% of the world’s amphibian, bird and mammal species are threatened by extinction. Wilson [4] suggests that half of the species will face an extinction by 2100. Nonlinearities, positive feedbacks, abrupt collapses and regime shifts are being observed globally. The rate of temperature increase, ocean acidification, sea level rises, anoxic ocean dead zones and extinctions make the recent mass extinction comparable with the “Big Five”, even with the greatest End Permian extinction event, which wiped out 90% of species [5].6

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She indicates that the first stage of mass extinctions have been driven by deterministic factors attributable to direct human effects that undermine biodiversity and resilience of ecosystems and the next stage will be characterised by stochastic events that ‘bring about sudden collapses of weakened ecosystems’. The outstanding political question concerns collective will formation within a multipolar international system to avoid global catastrophe through climate warming. Geopolitical and military overreach Yet even so there does seem to be something to the theory of US geopolitical and military overreach focused on the issue of whether the 800-1000 US bases around the world are sustainable or, indeed, an appropriate response to Chinese ‘infrastructuralism’ and the rising economic power of China in the Asian Century. The Watson Institute report that US militarism since 9/11: ‘(i) The US federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars: $8 trillion; (ii) Deaths in the post9/11 wars: 929,000; (iii) Civilians killed as a result of the fighting: 387,000.7 These statistics should not disguise the extent to which the American war machine is tired and outworn. Paul Kennedy (2021) asks the inevitable question ‘is the era of Pax Americana ending, to be replaced by the Asian century?’ only to postpone an immediate answer to recognise the way the international system no longer a bipolar one, now comprised of a multipolar system dominated by several large states including China, US, India and Russia, not to mention the European Union, Japan, Indonesia and Iran, none of which can command the others and which require coordination through world agencies like the UN. Examining the changes from the context of the 1980s after the fall of the Soviet system, Kennedy (2021) notes ‘America’s armed forces are considerably smaller and older than they were in the 1980s’. In the twenty-first century many US commentators in various opinion pieces and policy briefs have suggested effectively the end of long-run Western global dominance. Paul Kennedy (1987) in Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, correlated Great Power ascendancy with economic resources and warned of military overstretch. Many commentators hold that the era of Western hegemony seems to be coming to an end with the economic shift from West to East gathering pace. Robert Kagan (2004, 2021) of the Brookings Institute and co-founder the infamous ‘Project for the New American Century’ has consistently argued that the decline of America is a myth and that it will remain a superpower. The economic shift from West to East should not be taken as evidence of American decline even though it clearly presages the rise of Asia and the increasing dominance of China. It may mean the waning or the end of the liberal international order (Ikenberry, 2018; Mearsheimer, 2019) but who knows what new political, military or trading relationships the ‘Five Eyes’ Anglophone countries of US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will enter into, or with whom.

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Decline of the West/rise of Asia The decline of the West has been a powerful world historical narrative and an essential part of the dialectic of the rise of Asia since the early twentieth century. Oswald Spengler’s (1991; 1918) The Decline of the West involved a rejection of the Eurocentric view of history to indicate that the civilization decline of cultures considered as organic entities lasted approximately 1000 years. Western medieval philosophers held the westward movement of events that once it reached the end of the earth it would have to confront the idea that we are approaching the end of the ages. This becomes a common theme in the onto-epistemology of the eighteenth century, driven by the theological speculation of the Abrahamic religions. Hegel’s (2001, orig. 1857) lectures on the philosophy of history described meaning in terms of the realization of human freedom. He found the first phase in Asia but he argues that while the political life of the East exhibits rational freedom it does so without advancing subjective freedom. In China and India in contrast to the West, there was mere ‘duration, stability…ahistorical history.’ In the 19th century economically deterministic theories tied the decline of the West to the rise of the East. Marx’s initially saw China in terms of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ ruled by an urban clique who appropriated the surplus in a pre-capitalist mode of production. Yet the Marxist view of history, as President Xi puts it, ‘illuminated the path of humanity’s exploration of the law of history and humanity’s search for their own liberation.’8 These are highly speculative matters with deep historiographical assumptions that require careful treatment and the evaluation of deeply buried eschatological assumptions. Contemporary historical developments and growth forecasts does not mean that transition to the ‘Asian Century’ is guaranteed even although it looks inevitable. Asia faces great cultural and religious diversity and it faces many new risks including growing inequality. Major differences in modes of governance, including the rise of Islamic states such as Indonesia, the existence of Communist governments in China and Vietnam, and the emergence of strong capitalist democracies like Singapore and South Korea, should not necessarily impact on regional integration through trade. ASEAN has successfully negotiated major free trade agreements (TPP, RCEP) but must confront a raft of ecological and political problems including those of perceived legitimacy. The Economist’s series on America’s changing geopolitical standing and the future of American power contains articles by those who warily predict decline and those who advance the thesis that America’s civilisation will prevail.9 Some years ago Kumar (2014) commented on the return of the concept ‘civilization’ and Arnold Toynbee’s use of it to argue for the equal value of all civilizations yet the rise of China was not so much on the radar as it is today. If we roll back the years to George Bush’s ‘The War on Terrorism’ we can see the beginning of the neoconservative ‘Project for the American Century’ founded

42  Michael A. Peters

by William Kristol and Robert Kagan which precipitated by 9/11 led to the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq.10 It was ultimately a narrative about moral decline and corruption at home. The think-tank developed a robust interventionist form of Reagan global militarism initiating a period of which the end of the war in Afghanistan is the conclusion. An Indian paper, The Financial Express suggests: ‘Withdrawal from Afghanistan will mark the end of the American empire: India should return to the strategic fundamentals. In all probability, Afghanistan could return to the 1996 situation or maybe not, as some would like to believe. But the Biden administration wouldn’t care less for the ensuing regional fallouts.’11 US declinism This adds to the chorus of scholars who embrace a version of ‘declinism’, the general view that, following Oswald Spengler, that the West is in a period irreversible decline while the East is rising. The theory has been to applied specifically to the end of the American Empire, sparked by the rapid and unseemly end of the war in Afghanistan. Thus, the conservative British historian Niall Ferguson (2021) suggests that the end of America’s empire won’t be peaceful and that as America pulls out from twenty years of war in Afghanistan, America’s decline mirrors Britain’s a century ago.12 Rebecca Gordon (2021) writing for The Nation suggests the ‘The US Empire Is Crumbling Before Our Eyes’ with signs of the same factors that caused the Roman Empire to collapse: ‘gross economic inequality; over-spending on military expansion; political corruption; deep cultural and political fissures’.13 She first discusses the doctrines –Munroe, Truman, Bush—that have been used to legitimate imperial reach through which America has extended its territorial acquisition and control, including the ‘neocolonial model’ to gain control of poorer countries under the Washington Consensus and structural adjustment policies. The true extent of imperial power after the collapse of the Soviet Union was revealed in Bush’s ‘unipolar world’ as part of the neoconservative Project for the American Century that set the stage for invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and the Iraq War. Twenty-first century America after Trump exhibited ‘an empire in decay’ based on: ‘Grotesque Economic Inequality, Wild Overspending on the Military, Corruption So Deep It Undermines the Political System, and A Country in Ever-Deepening Conflict’. Wade Davis (2020), who holds a chair in ‘Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk’ at the University of British Columbia, talks of the ‘Unraveling of America’ and how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era.14 He clearly embraces a version of declinism: No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th and Britain the

‘Declinism’ and discourses of decline  43

19th. Bled white and left bankrupt by the Great War, the British maintained a pretense of domination as late as 1935, when the empire reached its greatest geographical extent. By then, of course, the torch had long passed into the hands of America. In these ‘declinist discourses’ much is made of a divisive politics that has disabled democracy as an operating system with a heavily polarised polity and the politics of insurrection still in the air in Washington with a solid far-right element backing Trump at the next election and parties split along lines of racist (BLM) and sexist (abortion) politics. How can a split America lead the world on risks of global collapse when it cannot even heal its own divisions or provide for the collective welfare in a pandemic of its own people? Decline and fall China is only one player in the new multipolar international system although it is the one that has been most demonised in the China-threat discourse crafted by Trump and to a large extent continued by Biden in the trade and tech wars (Peters, 2019, 2021; Peters et al., 2021). The belief in ‘declinism’ is to be traced to the western historiographical tradition dating from Edward Gibbon’s (1974; orig. 1776-8) The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and arguably represents an apocalyptic vision that stretches back even further to the Book of Revelation as part of Christian eschatological understanding and a theology of creation entailing a teleological view of nature moving towards a transcendent future. It is not surprising that the Christian Right are ready to believe the fulfilment of these dangerous Biblical narratives they anxiously perpetrate. The same deep cultural assumptions are embodied in all Abrahamic religions that vitiate historical writing and today also surfaces differently but strongly in poststructuralist and postmodernist discourses giving rise to cyclical theories of historical and cultural renewal. Gibbon was the first historian in English to give an ‘evidential’ vision of the decline of the Western society based on the experience of the Roman Empire that collapsed through the loss of virtue by its citizens. It became a historical model thereafter developed differently by Marx, Goethe, Nietzsche, Vico, Spengler, Gramsci and Toynbee. Gibbon’s ‘model’ raised the inescapable comparison for both the British and American empires, contributing to an explanation of moral decline that has caused the decadence of society, the degeneration of institutions and infected the general health of liberal government – a kind of internalist theory of natural growth that contains the seeds of its own decay. If we have passed from the Cold War bipolar system of international relations to a multipolar system comprised of China, US, India, Russia, EU, and Japan it is necessary also to acknowledge various political and trade associations like ASEAN and the Eurasian Economic Union. Under this new international system, if it is to work in the interests of the global community, it is an

44  Michael A. Peters

urgent and necessary priority to reform and strengthen world institutions like the UN, WTO, and WHO and streamline decision-making. Only a multipolar international system working in concert is able to avoid global catastrophes like Covid-19 and an impending ecological collapse. Notes 1 https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/south-asia/ashraf-ghani-taliban-russia-­ kabul-b1903300.html 2 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/23/bidens-claimthat-nation-building-afghanistan-never-made-any-sense/ 3 https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-978019539 0155/obo-9780195390155-0082.xml 4 https://www.cairn-int.info/dossiers-2020-9-page-1.htm 5 https://www.cairn-int.info/dossiers-2020-9-page-1.htm 6 https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/61597 7 https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ 8 https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Full-text-of-Xi-Jinping-s-speech-on-the-CCPs-100th-anniversary 9 https://www.economist.com/future-of-american-power 10 https://web.archive.org/web/20130609011554/ http://newamericancentury. org/ 11 https://financialexpress.com/world-news/withdrawal-from-afghanistanwill-mark-the-end-of-the-american-empire-india-should-return-to-the-strategicfundamentals/2239105/lite/ 12 https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/08/20/niall-fergusonon-why-the-end-of-americas-empire-wont-be-peaceful 13 https://www.thenation.com/article/society/american-empire-decline/ 14 https://www. rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentar y/covid-19-end-ofamerican-era-wade-davis-1038206/

Orcid Michael A. Peters iD http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1482-2975

References Cairn.info. (2020). The age of catastrophe? https://www.cairn-int.info/dossiers2020-9-page-1.htm Davis, W. (2020). The unraveling of america. Rolling Stone. https://www.­ rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-americanera-wade-davis-1038206/ Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. Viking. Ehrlich, P. (1968). Population bomb. Ballantine. Ferguson, N. (2021). Niall Ferguson on why the end of America’s empire won’t be peaceful. The Economist, Series on the Future of American Power. https:// www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/08/20/niall-ferguson-on-why-theend-of-americas-empire-wont-be-peaceful

‘Declinism’ and discourses of decline  45 Gibbon, E. (1974). The decline and fall of the Roman empire. J.B. Bury, 1898 to 1925, reprinted. AMS Press, 1974. [1776–8] Gordon, R. (2021). The US Empire is crumbling before our eyes. The Nation. https:// www.thenation.com/article/society/american-empire-decline/ Hegel, G. W. F. (2001; orig. 1857). The philosophy of history Preface Charles Hegel, (J. Sibree, Trans.). Batouche Books. [1857] Ikenberry, G. J. (2018). The end of liberal international order? International Affairs, 94(1), 7–23. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iix241 Kagan, R. (2004). Of paradise and power: America and europe in the new world order. Vintage. Kagan, R. (2021). A superpower, like it or not why Americans must accept their global role. Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/202102-16/superpower-it-or-not Kennedy, P. (2021). Paul Kennedy on whether China’s rise means America’s fall. The Economist, Series on the Future of American Power. https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/09/01/paul-kennedy-on-whether-chinas-risemeans-americas-fall Kennedy, P. (1987). The rise and fall of the great powers: Economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000, Random House. Kumar, K. (2014). The return of civilization—And of Arnold toynbee? Comparative Studies in Society and History, 56(4), 815–843. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0010417514000413 Meadows, D., Meadows, D., Randers, J., & Behrens, W. W. III, (1972). Limits to growth. Potomac. Mearsheimer, J. J. (2019). Bound to fail: The rise and fall of the liberal international order. International Security, 43(4), 7–50. https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00342 Pálinkás, M. (2018). Characteristics of collapsing ecosystems and main factors of collapses. In L. Hufnagel (Ed.), Ecosystem services and global ecology. Intech Open. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.75124 https://www.intechopen. com/chapters/61597 Peters, M. A. (2019). Trade wars, technology transfer, and the future Chinese technostate. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(9), 867–870. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00131857.2018.1546109 Peters, M. A. (2023). US-China relations: Towards strategic partnerships, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55:5, 545–550, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2021.1937994 Peters, M. A., Means, A. J., Ericson, D. P., Tukdeo, S., Bradley, J. P. N., Jackson, L., Misiaszek, G. W. (2022) The China-threat discourse, trade, and the future of Asia. A Symposium, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 54:10, 1531–1549, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2021.1897573 Servigne, P., & Raphaël Stevens, R. (2020). How everything can collapse: A manual for our times. Polity. Sinaï, A. (2013). Think about degrowth. Politics of the anthropocene i. Presses de Sciences Po. Sinaï, A. (2015). Post-growth economy. Politics of anthropocene II. Presses de Sciences Po. Sinaï, A. (2017). Govern degrowth. Politics of the anthropocene III. Presses de Sciences Po.

46  Michael A. Peters Spengler, O. (1991). The decline of the west. Helmut Werner (Editor) Arthur Helps, (Translator), Charle Francis Atkinson (Translator) H Stuart Hughes (Introduction). Oxford University Press, Abridged. [1918-23] Tainter, J. (1988). The collapse of complex societies. Cambridge University Press. Thacker, E. (2020). Why is pessimism compelling? https://www.cairn-int.info/dossiers2020-9-page-1.htm

Chapter 4

Russian apocalypse, Christian fascism and the dangers of a limited nuclear war Michael A. Peters

President Putin’s administration is again on record as asserting the right to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Putin was widely reported as establishing the nuclear threat at the very start of the war, warning that western intervention would reap ‘consequences you have never seen’. Now the Russian invasion of Ukraine has reached a stalemate with unexpected fierce resistance from Ukrainian fighters reported taking back the city of Kherson, the possibility of a limited nuclear strike has been mentioned in relation to the first strike tactical objective of ‘de-escalating’ the conflict on terms favourable to Russia. This possibility is no longer in the realms of science fiction.1 The conventional understanding in Washington is that as long as the US and NATO do not enter into a direct military engagement with Russia in Ukraine, the likelihood of nuclear conflict is minimal but the risks increase the closer that NATO edges toward this nebulous line in the sand. Supplying weapons to Ukraine might not invoke it but imposing a no-fly zone almost certainly would. Daniel Boffey (2022) reports that the former president Dmitry Medvedev ‘said Moscow could strike against an enemy that only used conventional weapons while Vladimir Putin’s defence minister claimed nuclear ‘readiness’ was a priority.’2 Medvedev indicated that Russia’s nuclear deterrence doctrine ‘did not require an enemy state to use such weapons first’. The basic principles of Russian o[policy of nuclear deterrence was released only last year, no doubt as part of the build-up to this historical moment. The President of the Russian federation released an executive order ‘On Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence’ translated into English on June 8.3 The seven-page document No 355 represents ‘a strategic planning document in the area of ensuring defence and reflect the official view on the essence of nuclear deterrence, identify military risks and threats to be neutralized by implementation of nuclear deterrence, the principles of nuclear deterrence, as well as the conditions for the Russian Federation to proceed to the use of nuclear weapons.’ Paragraph 15 outlines the principles of nuclear deterrence as: a compliance with international arms control commitments; b continuity of activities ensuring nuclear deterrence; DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895-5

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c adaptability of nuclear deterrence to military threats; d unpredictability for a potential adversary in terms of scale, time and place for possible employment of forces and means of nuclear deterrence; e centralization of governmental control over the activities of federal executive bodies and organizations involved in ensuring nuclear deterrence; f rationality of structure and composition of nuclear deterrence forces and means and their maintaining at the minimal level sufficient for implementing the tasks assigned; g maintaining permanent readiness of a designated fraction of nuclear ­deterrence forces and means for combat use. The document also makes clear that ‘18. The decision to use nuclear ­weapons is taken by the President of the Russian Federation.’ Shannon Bugos (2020) notes that ‘The document presents four scenarios that might warrant nuclear use, two of which did not appear in the 2014, 2010, and 2000 versions of Russia’s military doctrine.’ Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear weapons against the Russian state but also in the event using conventional weapons when ‘the very existence of the state is in jeopardy’ or when aa conventional attack might cause such a disruption that might undermine nuclear forces response actions’.4 While the essence of the policy is defensive it also describes ‘the inevitability of retaliation in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation and/ or its allies’ and describes the military threats of aggression deterrence is designed to neutralise including the deployment of ‘missile defence systems and means, medium- and shorter-range cruise and ballistic missiles, non-nuclear high-precision and hypersonic weapons, strike unmanned aerial vehicles, and directed energy weapons.’ The summary occurs at paragraph 19: The conditions specifying the possibility of nuclear weapons use by the ­Russian Federation are as follows: a arrival of reliable data on a launch of ballistic missiles attacking the territory of the Russian Federation and/or its allies; b use of nuclear weapons or other types of weapons of mass destruction by an adversary against the Russian Federation and/or its allies; c attack by adversary against critical governmental or military sites of the Russian Federation, disruption of which would undermine nuclear forces response actions; d aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy These condition should not form the framework for an assessment of a limited nuclear war occurring in Ukraine as part of the Russian offensive. One must begin to realise that what appeared like a minimal risk of nuclear war now seems not unimaginable, possible and a lot more probable. The risks of nuclear

Russian apocalypse, Christian fascism  49

war in the Ukraine on the basis of this policy should be taken a lot more seriously. They state quite precisely the conditions of use and the NATO should now engage the new rules that now shape the future of European security with care. Reputed Russia has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world with over 6,000 nuclear warheads in 2022: ‘Nearly half of the world’s 12,700 nuclear weapons are owned by Russia’ with the Soviet Union having stockpiled 45,000 at its peak in 1986.5 Hans M. Kristensen (2020) as Editor of The Nuclear Notebook column has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987, makes the following estimate: Russia’s nuclear arsenal, which includes a stockpile of approximately 4,477 warheads. Of these, about 1,588 strategic warheads are deployed on ballistic missiles and at heavy bomber bases, while an approximate additional 977 strategic warheads, along with 1,912 nonstrategic warheads, are held in reserve. Russia is continuing a comprehensive modernization program intended to replace most Soviet-era weapons by the mid- to late-2020s and is also introducing new types of weapons.6 (italics in original) As Kristensen and Korda (2020) reports Russian has modernised over 88 percent of its nuclear arsenal and quotes Putin’s extreme concern at the Mk 41 launchers installed in Romania easily adaptable to the use of the Tomahawk strike systems and his disappointment at the deterioration of US-Russia arms regime control. Russia has over 300 launchers for ICBMs with a total of 534 strategic offensive forces for an overall total of 5,977 warheads with some retired warhead witing to be dismantled. He also notes Gen. John Hyte’s, the former head of the US Strategic Command, assessment of the Russian doctrine ‘to escalate to disescalate’ and the implication that Russia may use a nuclear weapon in a first strike capacity. Cordon Corera clearly thinks that Russia could conceivably use ‘tactical nuclear weapons’ – bombs and missiles used as ‘battlefield’ weapons – against Ukraine.7 Christian fascism In ‘Putin’s Philosopher’ Anton Barbashin (2015) begins his account by mentioning a documentary shown in Russian TV in 2000 on the anniversary of Putin’s inauguration: ‘the movie offered a blunt message: in the 15 years of ­Putin’s rule, he had saved Russia from the forces of destruction, both ­internal— Chechnya and the oligarchs—and external—insidious Western ­ influence’; ‘­Putin is not just a political savior: his leadership has also been important for the spiritual revival of Russia and its people.’8 As Barbashin (2015) indicates Putin has become the spiritual leader of Russia as well as the political leader – it’s a spiritual politics build on the legacy of the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin

50  Michael A. Peters

(1883-1954). Ilyin was brought up in the grandeur of the Grand Kremlin Palace. His mother a German-Russian Lutheran converted to Russian Orthdoxy when she married Alexander Ilyin. He completed a law degree at Moscow State University, becoming interested in Christian jurisprudence and liberal philosophy under Pavel Ivanovich Novgorodtsev who was a neo-Kantian who believe in natural law as a criterion for improving positive law. Ilyin studied Hegel on the philosophy of state and law. Having first support the February Revolution he turned against it assessing it as ‘the most terrible catastrophe in the history of Russia’. He became increasingly anti-communist and was eventually expelled in 1922, becoming the philosopher of the White Russian movement outside Russia and looked to the historical moment when Russia would rescue itself through Christian fascism (Snyder, 2018). He held that the Russian nobility had not provided the spiritual guidance and direction to the Russian people, posing Christian fascism as a possible third way between democracy and totalitarianism. The consciousness of law, a concept he developed from Hegel in About the Essence of Consciousness of Law, was a consciousness cultivated of the individual that was both righteous and morally proper as a state of obedience to the state. The consciousness of law in a monarchy would unite the people and the state. In National-Socialism: The New Spirit (1933) and On Fascism (1948) Ilyin advocated fascism and saw in it a way to protect Russian civilization. As he writes: Fascism is a complex, many-sided phenomenon and, historically speaking, is far from outdated. It has healthy and sick, old and new, state-protective and destructive [forms]. Therefore, in assessing it, calmness and justice are needed. But its dangers must be thought through to the end. Fascism arose as a reaction to Bolshevism, as a concentration of state-protective forces to the right. During the onset of left-wing chaos and left-wing totalitarianism, this was a healthy, necessary and inevitable phenomenon. Such a concentration will continue to be carried out even in the most democratic states: in the hour of national danger, the healthy forces of the people will always be concentrated in a protective-dictatorial direction. So it was in ancient Rome, so it was in the new Europe, and so it will be in the future. (Google translation of Opening lines of On Fascism, https://web.archive.org/web/20050214142008/ http://ru-contra.nm.ru/pi/2.html) Later in the opening pages he writes: ‘Finally, fascism was right, because it proceeded from a healthy national-patriotic feeling, without which no people can either assert its existence or create its own culture.’ He suggests that the gaps and errors of the past were: 1 Irreligion. Hostility towards Christianity, towards religions, denominations and churches in general.

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2 Creation of right-wing totalitarianism as a permanent and supposedly ‘ideal’ system. 3 The establishment of a party monopoly and the corruption and demoralization that grows out of it. 4 Going to extremes of nationalism and militant chauvinism (national ‘grand mania’). 5 Mixing social reforms with socialism and slipping through totalitarianism into the nationalization of the economy. 6 Falling into idolatrous Caesarism with its demagoguery, servility and ­despotism. (ibid, Google translation) As Barbashin (2015) writes: His works were first promoted within the Kremlin’s inner circle and then quoted by various state officials throughout the second half of the first decade of the 2000s. Putin’s own interest in Ilyin became apparent after 2006, when he began to feature the philosopher prominently in some of his major addresses to the public… Ilyin argues that the Russian state—by which he meant the old Russian Empire and its geographic descendant, the Soviet Union—is a unique geo-historical entity tied together by the spiritual unity of the Euro-Asiatic nations. Timothy Snyder (2018), the Levin Professor of History at Yale and advisor adviser to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies has recently published The Road to Unfreedom where he maintains the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin ‘provided a metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism’ now used and updated by Vladimir Putin to develop the practical outlines for a fascist state. Snyder discusses the Eurasian ideology originating with another Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin who proposes the realization of National Bolshevism. As Synder (2014) writes: Rather than rejecting totalitarian ideologies, Eurasianism calls upon politicians of the twenty-first century to draw what is useful from both fascism and Stalinism. Dugin’s major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997, follows closely the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi political theorist. Eurasianism is not only the ideological source of the Eurasian Union, it is also the creed of a number of people in the Putin administration, and the moving force of a rather active far-right Russian youth movement. For years Dugin has openly supported the division and colonization of Ukraine.9 Aleksandr Dugin (1997, 2012, 2014) was the main organiser of the forerunner of the Bolshevik Party and became a dissident and anti-communist in the 1980s after dabbling in mysticism. After the fall of the Soviet Union he wrote the program

52  Michael A. Peters

for The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, a party committed to Marxist-Leninism. In 1997 he published The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia that quickly became an established text for the ruling elite and seen as a kind of manifest destiny. In The Fourth Political Theory (2012) Dugin seeks foundations for a new ideology that supersedes liberalism, Marxism and fascism based on a geopolitical development of Martin Heidegger’s Dasein [Existence] to question the universal values of liberalism and the hegemonic position of the US and to put forward essentially conversative values and far-right ideologies (Dugin, 2014; see also Dugin 2012). On this basis he theorizes the foundations of a Euro-Asian civilization together with the union of all Russian-speaking peoples and the rejection of the USA and its strategic control. He founded the Eurasia Party in 2001 and he was pro-Russian conflict with Ukraine which he regards as a mere administrative state. By going supporting the war against the Ukraine he hopes to restore its Eurasian mantle as a credible world power. The links between Putin and Trump are to some degree ideological. The term ‘Christian Fascism’ has been used by Chris Hedges (2007; 2008) to ­describe the Christian right in the US and the white race as ‘God’s chosen agent’ for ‘purging the world of infidels and barbarians’.10 Should Putin prevail in the Ukraine and Trump attain a second term as US president it will license a strong relationship that creates vulnerabilities for liberal democracy in the US and elsewhere. While Ivan Ilyin provides a critical background on fascism, the consciousness of law and a new spiritualism Putin’s ideological is Alexander Dugin’s neo-Eurasian economic union and fascist geopolitics. It seems that Putin has shifted from one to the other. In either event and in the name of both philosophers the license to use a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield must be considered a possible response by Putin, however catastrophic it’s real world and symbolic consequences. Notes 1 Anki Panda, 2020, https://thediplomat.com/2020/06/whats-in-russias-newnuclear-deterrence-basic-principles/ 2 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/26/russia-reasser tsright-to-use-nuclear-weapons-in-ukraine-putin 3 https://archive.mid.ru/en/web/guest/foreign_policy/international_safety/ disarmament/-/asset_publisher/rp-0fiUBmANaH/content/id/4152094 4 Shannon Bugos, (2020) Russia Releases Nuclear Deterrence Policy https://www. armscontrol.org/act/2020-07/news/russia-releases-nuclear-deterrence-policy. 5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction 6 https://thebulletin.org/premium/2022-02/nuclear-notebook-howmany-nuclear-weapons-does-russia-have-in-2022/ 7 Ukraine war: Could Russia use tactical nuclear weapons? https://www.bbc.com/ news/world-60664169

Russian apocalypse, Christian fascism  53 8 Barbashin, Anton (2015) ‘Putin’s Philosopher’ The Hudson Institute, https:// www.hudson.org/research/11676-putin-s-philosopher. Also Anton Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn’s (2015) ‘Putin’s Philosopher: Ivan Ilyin and the Ideology of Moscow’s Rule’ Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ russian-federation/2015-09-20/putins-philosopher 9 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/03/20/fascism-russia-and-ukraine/ 10 https://www.salon.com/2020/01/03/onward-christian-fascists_partner/

References Barbashin, A. (2015). Putin’s philosopher. The Hudson Institute. https://www.­hudson. org/research/11676-putin-s-philosopher Boffey, D. (2022). Russia reasserts right to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/26/russia-reassertsright-to-use-nuclear-weapons-in-ukraine-putin Bugos, S. (2020). Russia releases nuclear deterrence policy. https://www.armscontrol. org/act/2020-07/news/russia-releases-nuclear-deterrence-policy Dugin, A. (1997). The foundations of geopolitics: The geopolitical future of Russia. Arktos. Dugin, A. (2012). The fourth political theory. Arktos. Dugin, A. (2014). Martin Heidegger: The philosophy of another beginning. Washington Summit. Hedges, C. (2007). The rise of Christian fascism and its threat to American democracy. Truthdig. https://www.alternet.org/2007/02/the_rise_of_christian_fascism_ and_its_threat_to_american_democracy/ Hedges, C. (2008). American fascists: The Christian right and the war on America. Free Press. Kristensen, H.M. (2020) The Nuclear Notebook, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, https:// thebulletin.org/premium/2022-02/nuclear-notebook-howmany-nuclear-weaponsdoes-russia-have-in-2022/ Kristensen, M., & Korda, M. (2020). Nuclear Notebook: How many nuclear weapons does Russia have in 2022? Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. https:// thebulletin.org/premium/2022-02/nuclear-notebook-how-many-nuclearweapons-does-russia-have-in-2022/ Panda, A. (2020). What’s in Russia’s new nuclear deterrence ‘Basic Principles’? The Diplomat. https://thediplomat.com/2020/06/whats-in-russias-new-nucleardeterrence-basic-principles/ Synder, T. (2014). Fascism, Russian and the Ukraine. The New York Review, March 20, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/03/20/fascism-russia-and-ukraine/ Snyder, T. (2018). The road to unfreedom: Russia, Europe America. Tim Duggan Books.

Chapter 5

The threat of nuclear war Peace studies in an apocalyptic age Michael A. Peters

Rick Gladstone and Rogene Jacquette’s (2017) exhaustive February story in the New York Times’ How the North Korean Nuclear Threat Has Grown’ suggests that North Korea’s nuclear weapons program has grown in four related areas that demand attention: arsenal size, bomb strength, missile technology, and ability to elude detection.1 They report the arsenal size is less than 10 nuclear weapons but they have enough plutonium and enriched uranium to build 20–25 nuclear weapons with explosive power that has increased from one to 10 kilotons in a decade and the technology to produce missiles that could reach the US continent by 2026. Gladstone and Jacquette (2017) comment on the smaller and more mobile weapons now produced that can now fit as a nuclear warhead on a missile. As of the late August 2017, missile tests carried out by North Korean indicate that Kim Jong Un is much further ahead than anyone anticipated. For the first time since pursuing a nuclear weapon program the threat seems real rather than just another saber rattling exercise designed to win US concessions. The chorus of mainstream Western press are all pretty well in agreement—that there is now, indeed, a nuclear threat from North Korea and the rogue state is rapidly arming itself with the possibility of developing intercontinental nuclear missiles. Stories and predictions of North Korea’s nuclear threat have been commonplace since the early 1990s, but something has changed. Both Tillerston and the Trump administration are talking of a new approach and even the unthinkable—nuclear talks with Kim Jong Un. The threat from North Korea seems to grow daily with each new test that now confirms the new perhaps historic capability to strike continental America and countries of the Pacific Rim. The ‘collateral damage’ of any US pre-­emptive strike would be appalling especially to South Korea with the consequence of leaving hundreds of thousands dead and the likely destruction of Seoul and other cities. The risks far outweigh any military strategy. The war rhetoric spilling out from North Korea against the US certainly also indicates that we may be approaching an end-game. But North Korea is not the only nuclear power in Asia and some of them have not been constrained in their pursuit of increasing their nuclear arsenal. DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895-6

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Owen Toon, Robock, Mills, and Xia (2017) write of the concentration of nuclear arsenals and their expansion in Asia: Of the nine countries known to have nuclear weapons, six are located in Asia and another, the United States, borders the Pacific Ocean. Russia and China were the first Asian nations with nuclear weapons, followed by Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Most of the world’s nuclear powers are reducing their arsenals or maintaining them at historic levels, but several of those in Asia—India, Pakistan, and North Korea—continue to pursue relentless and expensive programs of nuclear weapons development and production. When, we also take into account the new arms race that began after the USSR invasion of Afghanistan in 1982 and the prospect of Middle Eastern states or rogue states using nuclear weapons or ‘dirty bombs’ it is clear that nuclear war is perhaps more likely now than in any time in human history. This is the view of Rupert Cornwell (2017) of The Independent who argues ‘The Doomsday Clock shows we’re closer to the apocalypse than we have been since the 1950s.’2 The risks of nuclear accident have increased the probability of global catastrophe.3 Beginning in the 1950s, the rise of peace studies saw the emergence of international territorial norms, conflict management, and peace treaties. Peace and security studies began to appear as university courses. Peace education also developed mostly within international politics and as a cross-disciplinary subject, although peace as a pedagogical issue has a history going back to the American Civil War. The founding of the United Nations system in the 1950s, acted as a new catalyst and the Vietnam War provided a reformulation with a greater emphasis on ‘war as imperialism’ and conceptions of ‘positive peace’ (Dugan, 1989; Galtung, 1971; Miall, Ramsbotham, & Woodhouse, 2005). War and peace studies rarely featured in philosophy of education—a rather astounding observation given the prevalence of such political and military concerns in the twenty-first century and their ‘ethical burden’ for students. One prominent exception was the late radical educator Ilan Gur-Zéev (2001, 2010a, 2010b) a friend and scholar sadly missed. Gur-Zéev encouraged us to rethink the conceptualization of the field of peace education by examining its philosophical foundations. McGregor (2014) helpfully identifies ‘six prospective philosophical foundations for peace education,’ including Gur-Zéev’s, that are ‘mostly Western in their orientation … and, in the process, discovered and recounted a powerful counter-education to a perceived Western hegemony in peace education’ (p. 163). Peter Pericles Trifonas and Bryan Wright (2013) edited a useful collection entitled Critical Peace Education: Difficult Dialogs that took up the challenge of understanding peace education as a normalizing project of Western ideology to work toward a deeper conceptualization of peace and social justice.

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In my chapter ‘The Cold Peace’ with James Thayer, I sought to understand the liberal approach to peace with its commitment to ‘Just War’ theory and to critique prevailing notions of peace and its application to issues of social justice and citizenship as it underlies peace education and peace studies (Peters & Thayer, 2013). The chapter emphasized how issues of conflict and security for the twenty-first century is embedded within a post-national and post-liberal framework that shifts our understanding of peace, security, and risk toward a post-Cold War and post-Cold Peace context. This involved not only an understanding of how philosophical underpinnings of peace can be traced to Kant, who promoted the concept of peace as a foundation for liberal society but also the origins of ‘crimes against peace.’ The modern concept of ‘war crime’ surfaced at the Versailles Conference after World War I, but did not receive a comprehensive definition until the end of World War II in the form of the 1950 Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which was among the first international conventions to address war crimes. In commenting on the liberal world order and the growth of the ‘peace industry’ we commented: The peace industry is a subset of the security industry and now the basis for a considerable global bureaucracy that includes the United Nations, UNESCO and other world and national development agencies dedicated to such activities as: ‘peacekeeping,’’conflict resolution,’ ‘humanitarian relief,’ maintenance of ‘cease-fires,’ ‘comprehensive settlements,’ and ‘negotiation and mediation.’ The UN as the world’s major peacekeeping organization has been engaged in 63 peacekeeping operation since 1948 when the first peacekeeping operation was established. (p. 29) We also briefly examined the globalization of violence, the postmodernization of peace, and the neoliberalization of security (see also Peters, 2004). Against the prevailing analysis of the age as the bloodiest in recorded human history (e.g. Brunk, 2012), Pinker (2011) has argued that the decades since the end of the Cold War are best described as the ‘new peace,’ an assessment based on declining rates of homicide, the rise of humanitarian thinking, and the decreasing magnitude of wars. Pinker’s thesis in the present age of nuclear risk requires only one counterfactual—one nuclear strike by an aberrant power is enough to upset the theoretical applecart. Peace is a creation and project of modernity, a collective endeavor to develop ‘more elaborate ideas on how justice and the rule of law can nurture the bonds between the citizens of a given [global] polity’ (Ziemann, 2012). Of course, this is very much an internal description and grandiose liberal self-image that is somewhat also self-serving. With the turn of the Trump administration against the internationalist liberal global order that is concomitant with the rise of a kind of authoritarian populism (but quite different from the origin and application of the term first used by Stuart Hall to describe the advent of Thatcherism) it is theoretically

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useful and interesting to speculate on the means that Trump might contemplate to bring North Korea to heel, after giving up on the agencies of UN, NATO, and other agencies of the Western alliance. This leaves, more or less, Trumps’ tweets promising ‘fire and fury like the world had never seen’—­ indicating advanced planning of a US pre-emptive strike. In the mean while, we all continue to live with the daily threat but with more than a hint of apocalyptic nonchalance and postmodern cynicism. Nuclear war is only one of a series of possibilities for the ‘end times’ alongside extreme climate change and catastrophic weather events, the spread of world viruses, and the rise of military AI and robotization. The apocalyptic tradition is deeply rooted in Judaic and Christian narratives as a source of revelatory literature that is oriented toward the ‘end times’ and mediation to the transcendent reality of a supernatural world that promises eschatological salvation. (Collins, 1979; Derrida, 1984). This genre and tradition has reasserted itself as a form of thinking strongly relevant to framing thought concerning philosophy and education in the ‘end times’ (­Peters, 2011)—an Anthropocentric era that threaten by ecological, nuclear, and b ­ iological extinction. At the same time, Western culture is overrun by ­Hollywood zombies and blood-sucking vampires. Some argue that these apocalyptic fictional narratives provide an opportunity to work through the trauma of the breakdown of ethical frameworks after globalization, and the endless appetite for human violence demonstrated in a multipolar world with the rise of ­terroristic nonstate actors. If we accept these prevalent apocalyptic narratives especially the threat to our existence of a nuclear war how do we cope with the ethics of pedagogy? Do we as teachers become doom-sayers? Should we agree with Richard ­Pacholski (1989/2007) that ‘As nuclear holocaust threatens to end human civilization if not human existence itself, no topic is more worthy of study in these days?’ Are we to teach, for instance, with The Economist (2017) that ‘There are no good options to curb Kim Jong Un. But blundering into war would be the worst.’4 Ought we to argue that ‘nuclear weapons are so singularly inhumane we ought categorically to reject their use, whatever purposes they may be said to serve’ (Hayashi, 2015). Are we to teach students to prepare for the worst, to become what the American’s call ‘Preppers?’5 What burden of analysis of this nightmare scenario do we want students to accept and at what age? We can teach the pressing need for nuclear disarmament; we can teach about the international tensions and risks of further nuclear proliferation; we can, up to a point, critically discuss the political economy of nuclear weapons manufacture as an aspect of world production and the complicity of world science. The difficulty is when world security and nuclear risk is approached in terms of nuclear disarmament there is a tendency to rarefy agency and responsibility of individuals and nations when rogue nations, imperial states and nonstate terrorist groups pay no heed to global international conventions. Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have lived in the shadow of the threat of

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nuclear war yet the anxiety among youth today, if anything, has abated since the 1980s, rather than intensified as the threat has increased (King, 2017). Ultimately, what responsibility of care do teachers have toward their students in an apocalyptic age? Notes 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/world/asia/north-korea-nuclearthreat.html. 2 http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-nuclear-war-doomsdayclock-russia-putin-gorge-orwell-apocalypse-real-immediate-threat-a7550761. html. 3 http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/world-war-three-by-mistake. 4 http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21725768-there-are-no-goodoptions-curb-kim-jong-un-blundering-war-would-be-worst-how. 5 See e.g. http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/doomsday-preppers/.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

References Brunk, C. (2012). Shaping a vision: The nature of peace studies. In C. Webel, & J. Johansen (Eds.), Peace and conflict studies: A reader (pp. 10–24). Oxon: Routledge. Collins, J. C. (1979). Introduction: Towards the morphology of a genre. Semeia, 14, 1–20. Cornwell, R. (2017). The Independent, Nuclear war is no longer the stuff of dystopian novellas – it’s a very real and immediate threat. Retrieved from http://www. independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-nuclear-war-doomsday-clock-russiaputin-gorge-orwell-apocalypse-real-immediate-threat-a7550761.html Derrida, J. (1984). Of an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy. Oxford Literary Review, 6, 3–37. Dugan, M. (1989). Peace studies at the graduate level. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 504, 72–79. Galtung, J. (1971). A structural theory of imperialism. Journal of Peace Research, 8, 81–117. Gladstone, R., & Jacquette, R. (2017). How the north korean nuclear threat has grown. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/ world/asia/north-korea-nuclear-threat.html?mcubz=0 Gur-Zéev, I. (2001). Philosophy of peace education in a postmodern era. Educational Theory, 51, 315–336. Gur-Zéev, I. (2010a). Beyond peace education: Toward co-poiesis and enduring improvisation. Policy Futures in Education, 8, 315–339. Gur-Zéev, I. (2010b). Philosophy of peace education in a postmetaphysical era. In S. Gavriel, & E. Cairns (Eds.), Handbook on peace education (pp. 171–186). New York, NY: Taylor Francis.

The threat of nuclear war  59 Hayashi, N. (2015). On the ethics of nuclear weapons: Framing a political consensus on the unacceptability of nuclear weapons. Retrieved from http://unidir.ilpi.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/04/No-2-Ethics-NOHA.pdf King, E. (2017). How growing up with the threat of nuclear war shapes kids’ psyches. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/scienceofus/article/how-the-threat-of-nuclearwar-shapes-kids-psyches.html McGregor, S. (2014). Prospective philosophical foundations of peace education. Factis Pax, 8, 150–166. http://www.infactispax.org/journal Miall, H., Ramsbotham, O., & Woodhouse, T. (2005). Contemporary conflict resolution. London: Polity Press. Pacholski, R. (1989/2007). Teaching nuclear holocaust, the basic thanatological topic. Death Studies, 13, 175–183. Peters, M. A. (2004). War as globalisation and globalisation as war: The ‘Education’ of the Iraqi people. In M. A. Peters (Ed.), Education, globalization and the state in the age of terrorism (pp. 230–258). Lanham & Oxford: Paradigm Publishers. Peters, M. A. (2011). The last book of postmodernism: Apocalyptic thinking, philosophy and education in the twenty-first century. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Peters, M. A., & Thayer, J. (2013). The cold peace. In P. P. Trifonas, & B. Wright (Eds.), Critical peace education: Difficult dialogues (pp. 29–43). Netherlands: Springer. Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature. New York, NY: Viking. Toon, O., Robock, A., Mills, M., & Xia, L. (2017). Asia treads the nuclear path, unaware that self-assured destruction would result from nuclear war. The Journal of Asian Studies, 76, 437–456. Trifonas, P. P., & Wright, B. (Eds.). (2013). Critical peace education: Difficult dialogues. Netherlands: Springer. Ziemann, B. (2012). Review of histories of violence (Review No. 1232). Retrieved May 9, 2017, from http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1232

Chapter 6

Life and death in the Anthropocene Educating for survival amid climate and ecosystem changes and potential civilisation collapse Tina Besley and Michael A. Peters The media is now regularly reporting and highlighting global protest movements such as Greta Thunberg’s School Strike for the Climate and Extinction Rebellion (XR)1 alerting us to both the climate crisis and an existential crisis with the possible collapse of our civilisation in the near future. This is due to anthropogenic climate heating resulting in a range of climatic consequences largely caused by increased greenhouse gases especially from CO2 emissions, plus environmental degradations and mass extinction of our wildlife and biodiversity. While it may be alarmist and some scenarios seem extremist with many of the hallmarks of a moral panic (Cohen, 1973), the science of climate crisis, and the anxiety, fear, existential angst and even anger that blames the current generation for this crisis, is real, especially for many of our young people, so it is too important to dismiss and needs exploring. While for some in philosophy and education, it may not seem necessary to do as Greta Thunberg exhorts us, ‘to follow the science’ and to challenge those who refute or deny the contemporary climatic and environmental changes in our world, to us it is vital that philosophy of education engages with current world issues, which have ramifications that are in fact practical, economic, political, philosophical, existential, moral and ethical. In this paper we note the work published by The Guardian and their climate pledge: ‘we will continue to give global heating, wildlife extinction and pollution the urgent attention and prominence they demand.’ As Editor-in Chief, Katharine Viner said: ‘People need reminding that the climate crisis is no longer a future problem – we need to tackle it now, and every day matters.’ Their latest style guide argues for the following six phrases to be used because ‘We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue’ so the style guide sets out: ‘climate emergency’ or ‘climate crisis’ instead of ‘climate change’; ‘climate science denier’ or ‘climate denier’ instead of ‘climate sceptic’; ‘global heating’ not ‘global warming’; ‘wildlife’, not ‘biodiversity’; ‘fish populations’ instead of ‘fish stocks.’2 These changes have not yet been widely accepted but time will tell. The Guardian clearly follows the science of Intergovernmental

DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895-7

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Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as detailed in the Paris Agreement and subsequently updated in 2018: In order to keep below 1.5C of warming, the aspiration of the world’s nations, we need to halve emissions by 2030 and reach zero by mid century. It is also likely we will need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, perhaps by the large-scale restoration of nature. It is a huge task, but we hope that tracking the daily rise of CO2 will help to maintain focus on it. Both Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion go further, taking the stance that there is an imminent climate emergency, and that reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 is insufficient and not soon enough, and that it must start in 2020. A critique of such protest groups and in particular of XR, is that they not only are predominantly white and middle class, but the ‘lack of diversity, middle-classimage and glamourisation of arrest puts young black and brown people off’ and they appear apathetic yet already live ‘a nightmarish present, surrounded by poverty and austerity.’ What is more, the environmentalists show flashes of ignorance and xenophobia and have not shown solidarity with this community. Athian Akec, a black inner-city teenager from London points out that ‘for my cousins in the global south, the dystopian future has already arrived. A staggering 12 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia are already facing hunger caused by low rainfall. Deadly tropical diseases are spreading more easily as climate warms, and 780,000 people a year are dying in Africa because of air pollution.’ The lived experience of brown and black youth already means that stopping and being arrested is more likely than for white people and the negative career consequences more devastating for people already facing ‘zero-hour contracts, homelessness, poverty and knife-crime.’3 It is pertinent to briefly first briefly consider notions of civilisational collapse that have come to the fore. Second, to present the evidence for establishing the change in geologic time scale time from the Holocene to the Anthropocene epoch. Third, to present just some of the evidence for climate change especially that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Last, we briefly consider how we and educators deal with what is now widely considered to be a climate emergency and a potential collapse. We know that many teachers are teaching about climate and environmental changes and some of them and their students are taking action in various ways, but are or should we educate for survival? In February 2019, Luke Kemp, researcher from the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge, in a BBC article asked, ‘Are we on the Road to Civilisation Collapse?’4 He reflected on the collapse of

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past civilisations, as many other authors have done (e.g. Karl Butzer, Jared ­Diamond, Madhusree Mukerjee, Paul & Anne Ehrlich5) and notes that: Collapse can be defined as a rapid and enduring loss of population, identity and socio-economic complexity. Public services crumble and disorder ­ensues as government loses control of its monopoly on violence. Virtually all past civilisations have faced this fate. Some recovered or transformed, such as the Chinese and Egyptian. Other collapses were permanent, as was the case of Easter Island. Sometimes the cities at the epicentre of collapse are revived, as was the case with Rome. In other cases, such as the Mayan ruins, they are left abandoned as a mausoleum for future tourists. What can this tell us about the future of global modern civilisation? Are the lessons of agrarian empires applicable to our post-18th Century period of industrial capitalism? There is no agreement nor any one factor that leads to civilisational collapse, rather, Kemp notes that there are several explanations: climatic change, environmental degradation; inequality and oligarchy; complexity; external shocks; randomness/bad luck and that ‘Collapse is a tipping point phenomena, when compounding stressors overrun societal coping capacity’. Currently many of these stressors now exist and those that caused other societies to collapse are worsening in some parts of the world, but with our ability to learn from past civilisation collapses, to innovate and diversify are points of optimism that we can mitigate or avert disaster. Kemp continues, We know what needs to be done: emissions can be reduced, inequalities levelled, environmental degradation reversed, innovation unleashed and economies diversified. The policy proposals are there. Only the political will is lacking. We can also invest in recovery. There are already well-developed ideas for improving the ability of food and knowledge systems to be recuperated after catastrophe. Avoiding the creation of dangerous and widelyaccessible technologies is also critical. Such steps will lessen the chance of a future collapse becoming irreversible. We will only march into collapse if we advance blindly. We are only doomed if we are unwilling to listen to the past. Therefore, without being fear-mongers we ask if teachers should now be preparing students with survival skills and what might these comprise - in ­effect, practical skills, but also ethical and moral ones for how we might organise society in the event of such catastrophic events occurring. It is now well established that the Earth is already undergoing the Holocene inter-glacial warming period which began about 12,000 years ago at the end

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of the Pleistocene geological time period,6 where the series of seven cyclic climate changes in the last 650,000 years are related to ‘very small variations of Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives’.7 What is verifiably different now according to the IPCC, NASA and many other scientific reports, is, with 95% probability, that since the mid 20th century current warming results from human activity - it is anthropogenic. Data and evidence have been gathered from multiple sources - ice-core samples, satellites, paleontology records and so on. In particular greenhouse gases we emit continue to increase and sea level rises have accelerated. Challenges to the data have generally been from business interests (or should we say self-interests) and political sources, especially in USA, related to fossil fuels, rather than from a few science sceptics and the consensus about change has grown over time as more evidence has been presented.8 With such changes, the current era was first labelled the ‘Anthropocene’ by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen in 2000. While it has led to debate about such naming between geologists and environmentalists, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) convened a group of scholars to decide by 2016 whether to officially declare that the Holocene as over and the Anthropocene has begun.9 Nicola Davison10 in 2019 outlined much of the debate within geological and stratigraphical circles where the naming of geologic epochs resides with the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and is ratified by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). By 2016, Waters et al, in a co-authored article by a twenty-four person working group published in Science entitled ‘The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene’ pointed out that this was not simply a fluctuation.11 The abstract states they reviewed: Climatic, biological, and geochemical signatures of human activity in sediments and ice cores. Combined with deposits of new materials and radionuclides, as well as human-caused modification of sedimentary processes, the Anthropocene stands alone stratigraphically as a new epoch beginning sometime in the mid-20th century. But to be formally named, evidence from sediment core samples must show ‘the golden spike’– a major environmental change clearly through ‘a chemical or biological trace in the strata, which acts as the physical evidence of where one unit stops and another begins.’ To date, the mid 20th century is favoured as the starting point for the Anthropocene, with what Jan Zalasiewicz called ‘the bomb spike’: From the pragmatic stratigraphic perspective, no marker is as distinct, or more globally synchronous, than the radioactive fallout from the use of nuclear weapons that began with the US army’s Trinity test in 1945. Since the

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early 1950s, this memento of humankind’s darkest self-destructive impulses has settled on the Earth’s surface like icing sugar on a sponge cake. Plotted on a graph, the radioactive fallout leaps up like an explosion. (Davison, 2019) From the earlier arguments about the term and the start of the new e­ poch, the Anthropocene has now become a well-established term used with a burgeoning literature across the sciences, humanities as well as popular literature. By 2013 ‘It appeared in nearly 200 peerreviewed articles…Elsevier has launched a new academic journal titled Anthropocene.’ In Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT) recently there have been several articles, for example: Jason J. Wallin (Wallin, 2017) Pedagogy at the brink of the postanthropocene: Iris Duhn (Duhn, 2018) After the ‘post’: anthropocenes; Margaret Somerville (Somerville, 2018) Anthropocene’s time; Margaret Somerville & Sarah J. Powell (Somerville & Powell, 2019) Thinking posthuman with mud: and children of the Anthropocene; Robert Stratford (Stratford, 2019) Educational philosophy, ecology and the Anthropocene; Yoshifumi Nakagawa & Phillip G. Payne (Nakagawa & Payne, 2019) Postcritical knowledge ecology in the Anthropocene; Mark Featherstone (Featherstone, 2019) Stiegler’s ecological thought: The politics of knowledge in the Anthropocene. In 2015, the IPCC 5th Assessment report provided the scientific input into the Paris Agreement12, which aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Many countries considered that a level of global warming close to 2°C would not be safe and, at that time, there was only limited knowledge about the implications of a level of 1.5°C of warming for climate-related risks and in terms of the scale of mitigation ambition and its feasibility. Parties to the Paris Agreement therefore invited the IPCC to assess the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and the related emissions pathways that would achieve this enhanced global ambition. But subsequent data has raised the level of alarm increasingly higher. The 2018 IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C states: … that recent trends in emissions and the level of international ambition indicated by nationally determined contributions, within the Paris Agreement, deviate from a track consistent with limiting warming to well below

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2°C. Without increased and urgent mitigation ambition in the coming years, leading to a sharp decline in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, global warming will surpass 1.5°C in the following decades, leading to irreversible loss of the most fragile ecosystems, and crisis after crisis for the most vulnerable people and societies.13 If we believe climate change scientists such as the IPCC, an increase of more than two degrees celsius in temperature will mean that humans lose control of the possibility of limiting global warming and the Earth’s system will continue to change because of the properties of the system. A four degree celsius increase will almost certainly be catastrophic: the tropics and much of the subtropics will become too hot for human habitation; areas of permafrost will thaw, as will the polar icecaps and alpine glaciers; extreme weather events will become the norm and will affect not only vulnerable islands, but will mean that large tracts of agricultural land will become unproductive; sea-level rises of 20-40 m will drown coastal land and major cities and knock out infrastructure. In short, the difference between 2-4 degrees will affect the Earth’s ability to sustain human life above the one billion mark. The main loss will be ‘human civilization’ with many predicting a return to barbaric practices and the survival of the fittest. ‘Progress’ will be a longforgotten mantra and the Big Mac, a figment of a robust imagination.14 Will Steffen, Emeritus Professor of Earth System Science at the Australian National University, makes the case: As with those early human societies, our modern highly-globalised civilisation is designed to operate in the benign conditions of the Holocene. But now, the scientific evidence is mounting that human activity is profoundly affecting the Earth system itself, and pushing us out of the life-friendly ­envelope of the Holocene. There has been a massive increase since 1950 in everything from global population and energy use to fertiliser consumption and international tourism – a phenomenon scientists call the Great Acceleration.15 He suggests that the problem is global overconsumption and we have lost control of the socio-economic system which is good at making some people rich but only at the expense of huge inequalities and irreversible ecological damage. In October 2019, The Guardian series of multiple articles on ‘The Polluters’ provides considerable details and data detailing the economic and environment connections to greenhouse gas emissions. Some of these revelations are astonishing. It is not enough to follow the science, but also, we need to follow the money. They examine who the biggest polluters of greenhouse gases are, which businesses are involved, how things have

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changed and are projected to change in these companies since the 2015 Paris Agreement; how social media has been used to resist climate regulations and the use of groups that term themselves grassroots community organisations but are funded by major companies is known as ‘astroturfing.’ … Within the Facebook adverts, the funders tend to be disclosed as the named group behind the adverts with no information on who ultimately controls these groups. Only through further research does oil company support become more clear.16 Similar to how the tobacco industry worked to dispute that smoking kills, major fossil fuel companies have worked to cast doubt on the reliability of the scientific research despite the overwhelming majority of scientists supporting it. Since 1989 the Global Climate Coalition has stressed uncertainties. A climate change ‘denial machine’ and the US ‘climate change countermovement’ (CCCM) that delayed action on the crisis emerged in the 1990s (Brulle, 2014; Dunlap & McCright, 2011, 2015). Not surprisingly these movements focussed on conservative politicians, media and thinktanks. Utilizing IRS data, total annual income is compiled for a sample of CCCM organizations (including advocacy organizations, think tanks, and trade associations). These data are coupled with IRS data on philanthropic foundation funding of these CCCM organizations contained in the Foundation Center’s data base. This results in a data sample that contains financial information for the time period 2003 to 2010 on the annual income of 91 CCCM organizations funded by 140 different foundations. An examination of these data shows that these 91 CCCM organizations have an annual income of just over $900 million, with an annual average of $64 million in identifiable foundation support. The overwhelming majority of the philanthropic support comes from conservative foundations. Additionally, there is evidence of a trend toward concealing the sources of CCCM funding through the use of donor directed philanthropies. (Brulle, 2014, p. 681) Brulle found that The communications plan involved finding sympathetic scientists, identifying thinktanks to fund that would produce helpful reports, and working through supposed grassroots groups to hold debates questioning the consensus on global heating, along with a constant flow of media briefings manufacturing uncertainty. [The US] thinktanks most identified with spreading doubt are Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Marshall

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Institute (which folded in 2015), the Cato Institute, the Heartland ­Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the campaign group Americans for Prosperity … which has received a very substantial part of its funding from the Kochs, helped make resistance to action on climate a feature of Tea Party rallies in the US. [Likewise the] Institute of Economic Affairs, and the Global Warming Policy Foundation have been prominent publishers of material questioning the consensus on climate science in the UK.17 From November 2009 we had ‘climategate’ when the emails of the Climate Research Institute at East University of Anglia suggesting that scientific data had been manipulated were hacked and circulated especially among denier sites. After several enquiries the scientists were exonerated. To attempt to reverse the fallout from this misinformation, Nature has provided an online collection that ‘brings together all of Nature’s coverage of the affair and its implications for the scientific enterprise.’18 Financial details offer a clear picture about why it is so hard to date to cut back on fossil fuels and to instead support renewables, because large asset management companies such as BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, not only support the fossil fuel industry, but also major investment banks have provided funds for expansion of such resources. To date in the global ­$74trillion asset management business, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, ‘the world’s three largest money managers have built a combined $300billion fossil fuel investment portfolio using money from people’s private savings and pension contributions’. They ‘oversee assets worth more than China’s entire GDP, have continued to grow billion-dollar stakes in some of the most carbon-intensive companies since the Paris agreement’….’ their effective thermal coal, oil and gas reserve holdings through the companies they manage have surged 34.8% since 2016’… and ‘BlackRock and Vanguard, have also routinely opposed motions at fossil fuel companies that would have forced directors to take more action on climate change’…19 The part played by the worlds largest investment banks, reveals that $700billion has been loaned to support expanding fossil fuel industries since the Paris Agreement which is astounding, as shown in an analysis for The Guardian by Rainforest Action Network, a US-based environmental organisation, which used Bloomberg financial data and publicly available company disclosures. It states: The financing has been led by the Wall Street giant JPMorgan Chase, which has provided $75bn (£61bn) to companies expanding in sectors such as fracking and Arctic oil and gas exploration, according to the analysis. The New York bank is one of 33 powerful financial institutions to have provided an estimated total of $1.9tn to the fossil fuel sector between 2016 and 2018.

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The data shows the most aggressively expanding coal-mining operations, oil and gas companies, fracking firms and pipeline companies have received $713.3bn in loans, equity issuances and debt underwriting services from 2016 to mid-2019. Other top financiers of fossil fuel companies include Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Figures show fracking has been the focus of intense financing, with Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America providing about $80bn over three years, much of it linked to the Permian basin in Texas. Although financing levels are on a smaller scale than other parts of the fossil fuel industry, in the years since the Paris climate agreement there has been increased financing for oil and gas projects in the Arctic, led by JPMorgan Chase, which provided $1.7bn in 2016-18. Extraction in the region is typically dominated by Russian firms such as Gazprom and Rosneft, about which there is less transparency in business data. Barclays is one bank showing signs of change. While it remains a significant banker for the fossil fuel industry, its business with the companies most aggressively expanding in the sector has fallen sharply, from $13.1bn in 2016 to $5.2bn in 2018. The first-half figure for 2019 shows the bank is on track to record another annual decrease.20 Despite this picture, The Guardian notes that there are eight ways we can ‘rein in the fossil fuel industry’: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Put climate on the ballot paper End fossil fuel subsidies Put a price on carbon Scale back demand for fossil fuels Stop flaring Roll out large scale carbon capture and storage Halt investment in fossil fuels Establish market metrics on climate change’21

Lately things seem to be starting to change as investors and shareholders have become more concerned about the climate crisis. Some may have heard Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, who has led efforts to address the dangers global heating poses to the financial sector, sounding a clear warning that ‘Companies and industries that are not moving towards zerocarbon emissions will be punished by investors and go bankrupt’. Furthermore, he says that ‘it was possible that the global transition needed to tackle the climate crisis could result in an abrupt financial collapse… the longer action to reverse emissions was delayed, the more the risk of collapse

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would grow.’22 Not surprisingly then, as awareness is raised, many shareholders and investors are increasingly demanding divestment from fossil fuels.23 This scenario whether it is true or likely to happen serves as a moral pointer and direction finder for schools and for national curricula. Can otherwise conservative forces get their act together before the ‘last days’ to actually address the question of climate crisis and its future environmental catastrophe before it happens? Can mitigation efforts work or be sufficient? Is there a possibility of a rapid curriculum and pedagogical transformation that matches the current burst of activist imaginations of young people who are worried about their future? Do schools have a duty to teach survival skills in the age of the Anthropocene? We can stop buying single use plastic bags in the supermarket and hold hands together in student strikes across the world, but can education authorities, teachers and schools find ways to address these questions and more in a meaningful way? Does the impending ecological global disaster require a more activist kind of learning that will enable students to do something that improves chances of survival? Should students even be taught skills of survival? What might those be? Paul Vare and William Scott observed as a key challenge in education for sustainable development back in 2007 that some such education can make people less sustainable, when the curriculum is designed as specific skills and ways of thinking for the short term, which are agreed upon by a broad community. Describing this curriculum as Education for Sustainable Development 1 (ESD1 and later ESD2), they noted that ‘it is assumed that learning leads to change once facts have been established and communicated.’24 They note that this is the historically prevalent approach authorized by top-down authorities such as UNESCO. While this is approach is positive because there are clear benefits to individuals and groups and obvious things one can do, not everything is simple. Therefore ‘ESD2’ is involved with building capacities to think think about and what authorities and experts say, emphasizing essential long terms skills. In this context they note that ‘ESD 2 not only complements ESD 1, it makes it meaningful, because our long-term future will depend less on our compliance in being trained to do the ‘right’ thing now, and more on our capability to analyse, to question alternatives and negotiate our decisions.’ As they go on, Authorities who promote sustainable development often see formal education in terms of ESD 1. This is worrying for two reasons: People rarely change their behaviour in response to a rational call to do so, and perhaps more importantly, Too much successful ESD 1 in isolation would reduce our capacity to manage change ourselves and therefore make us less sustainable.

70  Tina Besley and Michael A. Peters

This is a classic double bind: the more we focus on delivering ESD 1, the less likely it is that we will be asking people to think for themselves through essential ESD 2. Another obvious problem with thinking about survival and the curriculum is the conservative nature of curriculum, as a body of historical facts rather than as the most relevant and up-todate information. Arguably school education risks being irrelevant to a new generation of students who are already activist, perhaps more so than at any point in history – more so than the sixties and the era of Vietnam peace protests. Certainly, the current students’ strikes are more globally and better organized, thanks to the power of the Internet and social media. The Global Climate Strike of 27-29 September 2019 included 7.6 million people, reportedly the largest climate mobilization in history involving 185 countries.25 Green politics and protest have the potential to spread quickly around the globe and to sweep everything before it. It could be bigger than any existing movement or political party. It may also be the first movement, after encouraging world rebellion, to develop the core beliefs and values for a sustainable Earth. There are battles to be fought and the battle lines are clearly drawn between climate deniers and climate crisis supporters, between those who want to protect and save the Earth, and those who want to continue to profit from it (even up to the last days). Young people seem increasingly drawn to activist groups that want action immediately like Extinction Rebellion that advertises itself by emphasizing ‘mass extinction’ and the failure of conventional approaches: We are facing an unprecedented global emergency. Life on Earth is in crisis: scientists agree we have entered a period of abrupt climate breakdown, and we are in the midst of a mass extinction of our own making. … We are unprepared for the danger our future holds. We face floods, wildfires, extreme weather, crop failure, mass displacement and the breakdown of society. The time for denial is over. It is time to act. Conventional approaches of voting, lobbying, petitions and protest have failed because powerful political and economic interests prevent change. Our strategy is therefore one of non-violent, disruptive civil disobedience – a rebellion.26 On the other hand, there may also be a risk of climate crisis and related knowledge and education becoming overly politicized without grounding in this context an understanding of the scientific data that assesses the situation and future models and scenarios that are formulated. In the first place, a sense of urgency infused with fear can cause people to act rashly rather than with information, and to be paranoid of people with differing perspectives. One concern here is that a mainstream environmental movement can be held as overly liberal, with little recognition of the limitations to philosophical liberal views.

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As Paul Wapner and Richard Matthew (2009) note, there tends to be a focus in frameworks for global environmental ethics on human-to-human relations, to underscore a sense of urgency and a means to move discussion forward. Yet from other cultural views not dominated by a western liberal tradition, with its reverberations of Judeo-Christian philosophies, such a focus ignores life on Earth beyond human life, that humans are not the center of all that has happened or will happen on Earth, and that the natural world and non-human actors also exist apart from humanity, despite the apparent extent of human impact on global environmental systems. Philosophically other traditions may emphasize the limits to human understandings and human capacities to use the Earth for human gains and interests. Such philosophical debate risks being reduced in today’s binary, divisive popular culture as one of stereotypically cynical conservatives versus caricatured idealistic and arrogant liberals, without theoretical insights of both views, not to mention views of indigenous communities and others, being considered. Today schools around the world have crisis management policies. They educate for lockdown in the tragic events of mass shootings in the United States or terrorist attacks elsewhere, for recognizing dangerous snakes and spiders in Australia, and for knowing what to do during an earthquake, tsunami, typhoon/ cyclone, or volcanic eruption in other parts of the world. Climate change is being responded to in school and university infrastructural initiatives to use energy sustainably while noting the risks of educational environments becoming too cold or hot or dangerously icy, flooded, and more. In the past, what to do about the risk of atomic warfare was highlighted in schools when bomb shelters were constructed, but luckily the Cold War crises abated (for now.). Yet many of these initiatives have been and remain controversial. Debates surrounding them often relate to the lack of consensus about the likelihood of these risks, as well as the efficacy of possible responses and mediation strategies. In some cases, education to deal with risks may seem like a smokescreen to calm down students and keep them focused on content knowledge and business as usual, as fear, stress, and anxiety are seen to cut down on individual performances in standardized test scores, still the highest value in educational systems around the world. In other cases, whether the solutions can help is questioned; in many cases, such as in the case of typhoons and earthquakes, there may be little one can do, depending on the local geography of the school community. Finally, there are risks that such education can make things worse. Education on school shootings has been seen to in many cases cause more stress and dangers to mental health of students and educators, who become increasingly fearful about shootings risks, despite their relative rarity even in the United States.27 Survival skills required to sustain life in either natural or built environments, to provide basic necessities for human life include water, food, and shelter and proper knowledge and interactions with animals and plants to promote the sustaining of life over a period of time. Survival skills are often associated with the need to survive in a disaster situation. Survival skills are often basic

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ideas and abilities that ancients invented and used themselves for thousands of years. Outdoor activities such as hiking, backpacking, horseback riding, fishing, and hunting all require basic wilderness survival skills, especially in handling emergency situations. Bush-craft and primitive living are most often self-implemented, but require many of the same skills.28 Many schools already have outdoor education programmes, so it would not be unduly alarmist if schools added basic survival skills into the mix, or if they discussed how societies cope after a disaster. After all New Zealand already has had to deal with recent natural and man-made disasters - earthquakes and terrorist attack. Other places like Australia, the Pacific, Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China deal with cyclones and typhoons, earthquakes, tsunami, droughts and so on. Most educators are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but for survival, the physical ones are the most important in the first instance. Different sources may suggest more, but eight basic survival skills include:

• finding & purifying water. Nothing is more important in a survival situation than having suitable drinking water. …within the first 24 hours

• starting & tending to a fire • building a temporary shelter • navigating & reading a compass (& map) • hunting & foraging for food • camp cooking • dressing a wound … Basic first aid • tying a knot

There are specific outdoor education courses (e.g. Outward Bound), many TV programmes (e.g. Survival; Running Wild with Bear Grylls; Man vs Wild etc) and the Internet also has many websites that address survival skills.29 Unlike these scenarios, there seems to be no clear educational response on how to survive in the age of the Anthropocene, nor has this even been considered to date. A curriculum survival might include a focus on skills which are practical, cognitive, social, ethical and political. Beyond demonstration and protests what can we do? What is required to survive? What might a curriculum for survival look like? Maybe a checklist under several sub-headings is a starting point? Do we have a moral, ethical, personal or professional obligation to now begin such conversations in educational and political arenas? Or should we not bother and just do nothing in light of life and death in the anthropocene? Notes 1 See: Greta Thunberg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg; https:// www.fridaysforfuture.org/; https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/greta-thunberg; https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/12/if-they-dontdo-it-we-will-greta-thunberg-warns-climate-strikers-of-long-haul

Life and death in the Anthropocene  73 See: Extinction Rebellion, https://rebellion.earth/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Extinction_Rebellion; https://www.theguardian.com/environment/extinctionrebellion 2 See: Sophie Zeldin-O’Neill, October 16, 2019, ‘It’s a crisis, not a change’: the six Guardian language changes on climate matters. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/16/guardianlanguage-changes-climate-environment?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other 3 see, Athian Akec, 2O October, 2019, When I look at Extinction Rebellion, all I see is white faces. That Has to change. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2019/oct/19/extinction-rebellion-white-faces-diversity 4 Luke Kemp, 19 February 2019, Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? BBC https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse; see also 5 For example, see: Karl W. Butzer, (2012) Collapse, environment, and society, PNAS March 6, 2012 109 (10): 3632–3639. https://www.pnas.org/content/ 109/10/3632 Paul R. Ehrlich & Anne H. Ehrlich, (2013) Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? 07 March 2013. Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, https://doi. org/10.1098/rspb.2012.2845 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/ rspb.2012.2845 Madhusree Mukerjee, May 23, 2012, Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed the Environmental Point of No Return? Scientific American. https:// www.scientificamerican.com/ar ticle/apocalypse-soon-has-civilizationpassed-the-environmental-point-of-no-return/ Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997); Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005); The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012); Upheaval (2019). 6 See, National Centers for Environmental Information, https://www.ncdc.noaa. gov 7 See, Global Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet, climate.nasa.gov. 8 See, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), https://ipcc.ch; UN Climate Change https://unfccc.int/; Jonathon Watts, ‘No Doubt Left’ About scientific consensus on global warming, says experts. The Guardian, 24 July, 2019, refers to 3 studies in Nature & Nature Geoscience using historical data showing that over the last 2000 years temperature changes have ‘never been as fast or extensive as recent decades.’ 9 See: Joseph Stromberg, January 2013, Smithsonian Magazine https://www. smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-wein-it-164801414/#dXoPR1GFL1S7m4m8.99 10 Nicola Davison, 30 May 2019, ‘The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history?’ The Guardian: https://www.theguardian. com/environment/2019/may/30/anthropocene-epoch-have-we-entered-­ a-new-phase-of-planetary-history 11 Colin N. Waters, Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin Summerhayes, Anthony D. Barnosky, Cl_ ement Poirier, Agnieszka Gałuszka, Alejandro Cearreta, Matt Edgeworth, Erle C. Ellis, Michael Ellis, Catherine Jeandel, Reinhold Leinfelder, J. R. McNeill, Daniel deB. Richter, Will Steffen, James Syvitski, Davor Vidas, Michael Wagreich, Mark Williams, An Zhisheng, Jacques Grinevald, Eric Odada, Naomi Oreskes, Alexander P. Wolfe, The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene, Science 08 Jan 2016: Vol. 351, Issue 6269, aad2622. doi:10.1126/science.aad2622. https:// science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6269/aad2622

74  Tina Besley and Michael A. Peters 12 The Paris Agreement, https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-parisagreement/the-paris-agreement 13 See https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/SR15_Foreword.pdf 14 See, for instance, Will Steffen’s ‘Surviving the Anthropocene’ - http://www.uabsknowledge.ac.nz/en/research-and-comment/research-and-analysis/how-tosurvive-the-anthropocene.html; see also John Schellnhuber - A Climate Odyssey CCLS 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvgi6vXKzYk 15 See, Will Steffen, August 2017, How to Survive the Anthropocene. University of Auckland Business School. http://www.uabsknowledge.ac.nz/en/research-andcomment/research-and-analysis/how-to-survive-the-anthropocene. html; and, https://www.kth.se/polopoly_fs/1.360936.1550156528!/Menu/general/column-content/attachment/KTH_ GLOBAL%20SUSTAINABILITY_WS.pdf 16 See, Sandra Laville & David Pegg with analytics from Michael Barton, Sam Cutler & team, 10 October, 2019, Fossil fuel firms’ social media fightback against climate action, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ 2019/oct/10/fossil-fuel-firms-social-media-fightback-against-climate-action? CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other 17 See, Felicity Lawrence, David Pegg & Rob Evans, 10 October 2019, How vested interests tried to turn the world against climate science. The Guardian. https:// www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/10/vested-interests-publicagainst-climate-science-fossil-fuel-lobby?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other 18 See, Nature, Specials, at https://www.nature.com/collections/synrzkgmlf#ed 19 See, Patrick Greenfield, 12 October 2019, World’s top three asset managers oversee $300bn fossil fuel investment. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2019/oct/12/top-three-asset-managers-fossil-fuel-investments? CMP = Share_iOSApp_Other 20 Patrick Greenfield, 13 October, 2019, Top investment banks provide billions to expand fossil fuel industry. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/13/top-investment-banks-lending-billions-extract-fossilfuels?CMP = Share_iOSApp_Other 21 see, Fiona Harvey, Damian Carrington, Jonathon Watts & Patrick Greenfield, 14 October, 2016. How do we rein in the fossil fuel industry? Here are eight ideas. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/14/ how-rein-in-fossil-fuel-industry-eight-ideas?CMP = Share_iOSApp_Other 22 see, Damian Carrington, 13 October 2019, Firms ignoring climate crisis will go bankrupt, says Mark Carney, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/13/firms-ignoring-climate-crisis-bankrupt-mark-carneybank-england-governor?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other 23 see, Bill McKibben, 13 October 2019, Divestment works – and one huge bank can lead the way, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/ oct/13/divestment-bank-european-investment-fossil-fuels?CMP=Share_ iOSApp_Other 24 see: Vare & Scott, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/bdaf/ea78d331ea12458e30a643e0ca217aa1a0d2.pdf ?_ga=2.226013981.601042931.15700034061971791403.1570003406; https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/publications/ education-for-sustainable-development-twosides-and-an-edge; https://www.­ unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/env/esd/inf.meeting.docs/EGonInd/5meet/ Learning_Change_Vare_Scott.pdf 25 https://globalclimatestrike.net/ 26 https://rebellion.earth/

Life and death in the Anthropocene  75 27 See, Allison Paolini, School Shootings and Student Mental Health: Role of the School Counselor in Mitigating Violence, Vistas Online, American Counseling Association. https://www.counseling.org/docs/default-source/vistas/school-shootingsand-student-mental-health.p 28 see, https://www.definitions.net/definition/survival+skills 29 See Survival skills sites: https://www.outwardbound.org/blog/survival-skills-forthe-wilderness/; https://www. businessinsider.com/7-of-the-most-importantsurvival-skills-you-should-know-2018-4?IR = T;

References Brulle, R. J. (2014, February). Institutionalizing delay: Foundation funding and the creation of u.S. Climate change counter-movement organizations. Climatic Change, 122(4), 681–694. doi:10.1007/s10584-013-1018-7 Cohen, S. (1973). Folk devils and moral panics. London: Paladin. Davison, N. (2019) The Anthropocene epoch: Have we entered a new prase of planetary history? The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/ may/30/anthropocene-epoch-have-we-entered-a-new-phase-of-planetary-history Duhn, I. (2018). After the ‘post’: Anthropocenes. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(14), 1596–1597. doi:10.1080/00131857.2018.1461390 Dunlap, R. E., & McCright, A. M. (2011). Organized climate change denial. In J. S. Dryzek, R. B. Norgaard, & D. Schlosberg (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of climate change and society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dunlap, R. E., & McCright, A. M. (2015). Challenging change: The denial counter movement. In R. E. Dunlap, & R. J. Brulle (Eds.), Climate change and society: Sociological perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Featherstone, M. (2019). Stiegler’s ecological thought: The politics of knowledge in the anthropocene. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1. doi:10.1080/00131857. 2019.1665025 Nakagawa, Y., & Payne, P. G. (2019). Postcritical knowledge ecology in the anthropocene. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(6), 559–571. doi:10.1080/00131857. 2018.1485565 Somerville, M. (2018). Anthropocene’s time. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(14), 1584–1585. doi:10.1080/00131857.2018.1461428 Somerville, M., & Powell, S. J. (2019). Thinking posthuman with mud: And children of the Anthropocene. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(8), 829–840. doi:10. 1080/00131857.2018.1516138 Stratford, R. (2019). Educational philosophy, ecology and the Anthropocene. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(2), 149–152. doi:10.1080/00131857.2017. 1403803 Wallin, J. J. (2017). Pedagogy at the brink of the post-anthropocene. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(11), 1099–1111. doi:10.1080/00131857.2016.1163246 Wapner, P., & Matthew, R. A. (2009). The humanity of global environmental ethics. The Journal of Environment Development, 18(2), 203. doi:10.1177/1070496509334693. http://environmentportal.in/files/Ethics.pdf

Chapter 7

Education for ecological democracy Michael A. Peters

We have every reason to think that whatever changes may take place in existing democratic machinery, they will be of a sort to make the interest of the public a more supreme guide and criterion of governmental activity, and to enable the public to form and manifest its purposes still more authoritatively. In this sense the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy. –John Dewey (1927), The Public and Its Problems. Environmental ecology, as it exists today, has barely begun to prefigure the generalised ecology that I advocate here, the aim of which will be to radically decentre social struggles and ways of coming into one’s own psyche … Ecology must stop being associated with the image of a small nature-loving minority. Ecology in my sense questions the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power formations. –Felix Guattari (2000), The Three Ecologies.

Democracy, yet again Donald Trump’s decision to quit the Paris agreement, a contemptible decision that does the US no good in term of moral leadership and one almost universally condemned by world leaders, raises the question about the structural capacity of democracy at the extra-state level to reach consensus or indeed to action decisions at a global level. Under the circumstances one wonders whether democracy is able to deliver ecological outcomes or whether in the stand-off between democracy and oil and gas capitalism that it has the power to harness and transform the energy sector. The fact is that modern representative democracy was never designed to handle environmental challenges and many scholars now seek the establishment of new global institutions that carries the mantle for intergenerational environmental problems based on evidence-based sustainability science. One set of anxieties revolve around whether democratic institutions based on deliberative forms of government have the power to set new environmental norms, to curb the transnational energy multinationals or to institute change quickly enough in order to avert environmental collapse. DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895-8

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There is some evidence that democratic values increasingly operate now at the global level and multi-stakeholder dialogues between civil society, NGOs, governments and world agencies are now more common, yet some critics doubt whether concepts of world democracy will ever be strong enough to reconcile either radical participatory politics and the world’s energy multinationals, or the climate deniers and the scientific mainstream consensus. Some scientists despair that green diplomacy perhaps best represented in the Paris agreement, where the French hosts acting in concert with many agencies engineered an agreement with 195 countries, can ever protect itself and its environmental policy decisions against the actions of authoritarian thumb-nosing and outright grand-standing on the basis of flimsy ‘America first’ sloganising. Yet others talk of the longer term transformation of democratic culture aimed at producing green citizens committed to the principles of bioregionalism on the one hand and to principles of discursive democracy on the other, steadfast in their belief that deliberation is the appropriate space in which to change peoples’ habits, beliefs and actions. Ecological democracy The term ‘ecological democracy’ (ED) has been established in the literature for a couple of decades (Dryzek, 1992, 1997; Faber, 1998; Morrison, 1995; Ungaro, 2005), if not always in an explicit conceptual formulation. It is slowly evolving as a liberal notion that presupposes a link between democracy and ecology, sometimes cashed out in terms of ‘sustainable development’ or ‘green capitalism’ (‘green consumerism’) while emphasising that ED requires a form of grass-roots participation by citizens both individually and collectively. The exact nature of the link and the success and results of ED have been up for ongoing scrutiny and political scepticism. Both ‘ecology’ and ‘democracy’ are expansive concepts that have been refined and developed over the last couple of decades so it is not surprising that the links between these and cognate concepts are hard to pin down. There has been a peak in the use of the concept with applications in a variety of settings. For example, an online journal based in India established in 2013 has adopted the name (http://ecologicaldemocracy.net) which it introduces in the following way: The last century has seen many national movements successfully liberating countries from colonial rule. But since the last quarter of the twentieth century, we have witnessed world-wide schizophrenia in our ‘development’ policies. Global players like the US and European Union and arms of their economic hegemonies such as the World Bank and I.M.F. have forced governments to adopt policies which are resulted in a serious all round crisis, including an ecological crisis. On the other hand there is a multitude of UN Conferences on various dimensions of the ecological crisis. To understand

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this schizophrenia and to evolve policy frameworks to respond to this crisis from the ecological swaraaj perspective is the need of the hour. Our online journal www.ecologicaldemocracy.net is an effort to bring cohesion to the efforts of all who believe in the idea of ecological swaraaj [‘self-governance’ in Hindi]. The term ‘radical’ ecological democracy (RED) stands for degrowth policies, grassroots participation and has been used to demonstrate problems for existing democratic structures (Kothari, 2014; Mitchell, 2006). RED contributes to the search ‘for sustainable and equitable alternatives to the dominant economic development model’ that pursues the ‘goals of direct democracy, local and bioregional economies, cultural diversity, human well-being, and ecological resilience at the core of its vision’ (Kothari, 2014, p. 57). RED also maps on to the concept of ‘radical democracy’ developed by post-Marxist thinkers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe starting in the early 1990s (Laclau, 1990; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001). One line of thought, which I support, has begun to map notions of ‘radical’ and ‘open’ on to overlapping concepts of democracy and environment through notions of collective subjectivity (Peters, 2002, 2013). Hester (2010), in another example, outlines new principles for urban design that he calls Design for Ecological Democracy emphasising how ‘responsible freedom’ rests on respect and acknowledgement of an interconnectivity with all living things. Finally, an example- based on a workshop entitled ‘Ecological Democracy’ that was held at the University of Sydney 20–21 February 2017 that advertises itself in the following terms: The role of democracy in the face of global environmental threats has been subject to intense scholarly debate over the past four decades. At times, ecological democracy has had a bright future ahead of it. Yet the ideal of ecological democracy continually faces challenges both to its conceptual foundations and to its practical realisation on national and global scales. This workshop will seek to focus on new considerations and directions for ecological democracy, while looking back to examine the impact and viability of its founding texts as well as empirical studies of the relationship between democracy and sustainability. http://sydney.edu.au/environment-institute/ wp-content/uploads/2016/11/EcologicalDemocracy_-Draftprogramme.pdf The wide-ranging workshop included sessions on: Foundations of Ecological Democracy; Rights, Institutions, and Deliberation; Democracy and the Nonhuman; Culture & Ecological Citizenship; Diversity, Culture and ­Democracy; Ecological Democracy and Indigenous Peoples; Resources, Democracy and the Local. A panel discussion ‘Ecological Democracy – Looking

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Back, Looking Forward’ chaired by David Schlosberg with Robyn Eckersley, Karin Bäckstrand and John Dryzek as discussants, examine the attempts at reconciliation between democracy and sustainability within environmental political thought including problems of “the representation of the nonhuman, the relationship between democracy and ecological ‘limits,’ and the design of ‘green’ states.” The note continues: Since this first wave of scholarship [in 1980s and ‘90s] on ecological democracy, there have been numerous crucial developments that pose a range of challenges. On the environmental side, we have seen the acceleration of climate change, arguments for setting planetary boundaries around humanity’s environmental impacts, and widespread acknowledgement that the Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. On the political side, we have had the growth of environmental and climate justice movements, the proliferation of institutions for global environmental governance, and the anti-environmental and post-truth era. In short, the second wave of ED concerns the growth of political movements broadly embracing the concept of environmental justice in an attempt to counteract and address backsliding antienvironmentalism. The third wave of ED takes place in relation to President Trump’s anti-environmentalism, his withdrawal from the Paris agreement, his championing of world oil and gas, and cuts to the jurisdiction and budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. In this political environment, the future of environmental sustainability depends upon more radical forms of ED tied to notions of citizen science and forms of learning as activism. Origins and possibilities The concept and practices of ED have developed as part of a broader theoretical re-examination and conceptual development of ‘participatory,’ ‘strong,’ ‘discursive,’ ‘inclusive,’ ‘deliberative’ and ‘radical’ democracy (Barber, 1984; Dryzek, 2010; Ester, 1998; Gutmann & Thompson, 2002; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Young, 2000, 2001). These diverse threads spring in part from attempts to revisit democracy after the rise of neoliberalism in the age of globalisation that hastened the decline of social democracy. Social democracy as part of the Keynesian post-war consensus developed an ideology based on the compromise between market and the State that supported the mixed economy and capitalism as the means of wealth generation and distribution that necessitated State intervention based on rights and equality of opportunity to correct the defective tendencies of the market towards increasing poverty and growing inequalities. In effect, it was largely this attempted compromise that led to the first green social democracies and red–green coalitions in Germany under Gerhard

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Schroder (1998–2005), the ‘plural Left’ coalition in France (2012–2014), Lipponen’s first and second cabinet in Finland that included socialist and green members (1995–2002), Norway’s red–green coalition (2003–2013), with similar developments in Iceland, Italy, Denmark, Sweden and Portugal. Radical red–green alliances formed in the Netherlands (GreenLeft), Denmark (Unity List), Norway (Green Left Alliance), Italy (Left Ecology Freedom) and Greece (SYRIZA). There are also red/green political alliances and/or electoral agreements between social–democratic or liberal parties with green parties such as the Red–Green Alliance in Canada, Sweden and Italy. After the demise of the Keynesian-based and the empirically discredited neoliberal variant of capitalism, the goal of transcending global capitalism seems far-fetched and Left parties—Far-Left and centrist socialist—began to question the basis for renewed social democratic appeal. Under the Third Way, social democracy capitulated to neoliberalism and thus compromised the green market solution and no growth policies. Under the rise of authoritarian populism in its first phase with Thatcher–Reagan and then most recently under Trump, working-class voters have been easily captured by anti-immigration far-right parties that promise to bring back industrial jobs at home. The origins of green parties begin in the 1970s first in Australia and then Germany. By the 1980s and especially after Green Politics: The Global Promise (Spretnak & Capra, 1984), green agendas became more progressively tied to policy issues outside immediate ecological considerations.1 As Mendes (2015) notes the West German Green Party ‘founded in opposition to the guiding principles of the West German post-war consensus’ and their entrance into the Bundestag in 1983 marked a turning point in German parliamentary history but soon also reverted to traditions of political liberalisation with a mixture of classical elements of conservativism over conservation of resources. Jackson (2012, p. 593) suggests the Australian Greens, as a political organisation, are possibly following the transformation of European green parties moving from ‘a movement based party to a pragmatic parliamentary party.’ The question is where do green parties go after the Trump retrenchment of global oil & gas? Is there any legitimate resistance against neoliberalism and authoritarian populism that draws off the working-class vote? Education for Ecological Democracy Education has the possibility of bringing together two powerful concepts and international movements of ecology and local democracy that are needed to bring about the transformation of grass-roots civil society. This combination of ‘ecological democracy’ that rests on two fundamental principles—the freedom to participate in local society and our growing awareness of the interconnectedness of all living things. It also draws and encourages the development of new forms of green identity and citizenship.

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Peters and González-Gaudiano (2008) observed the evolution of environmental education over three decades towards a new relation to identity struggle, new social movements and green citizenship. During its thirty years of existence, despite having faced problems and diverse challenges from country to country, environmental education (EE) has acquired a certain influence over the design of educational and environmental public policies on an international level. Throughout these three decades, environmental education has contributed to the configuration of new ontological and epistemological proposals, as well as introducing practices that have become well-established and have made significant contributions to the strengthening of not only the environmental education field but educational processes in general. However, as EE became established a great variety of viewpoints were taken into account and elements incorporated not only from the widest variety of theoretical approaches and philosophical currents, but also from very different schools of thought and action, which established important articulations with complex social movements such as feminism, multiculturalism, peace, democracy, health, consumerism and human rights to mention but a few. One definition of ED emphasises sustainability in action by emphasising a relationship between biological processes and political subjectivities of participatory democracy considered as a co-evolutionary strategy. Education for Ecological Democracy is based an alternative democratic model that strives to educate students about the norms and values of democracy-in-action and eventually incorporate them as interested citizens into environmental decision-making and collective action. ‘Ecological democracy’ is still a concept in the formative stage. In its radical form ‘it places the goals of direct democracy, local and bioregional economies, cultural diversity, human wellbeing, and ecological resilience at the core of its vision’ (Kothari, 2014). In educational theory and practice it is closely associated with the notion of deliberation that is considered central to consensus decision-making and majority rule. The principles of deliberative democracy are embraced for their educative power and pedagogical force in teaching secondary school students to reason in democratic for a about ecological issues. The deliberative nature of ED has a strong base in grassroots participation within civil society. In philosophical terms, it is indebted to Dewey’s (1916) Education and Democracy and more recently to Habermas (1984) theory of communicative rationality that proposes the ideal of a self-organising community of free and equal citizens, coordinating their collective affairs through their common reason. Free and open debate is a necessary condition for the legitimacy of democratic political decisions based on the exercise of ‘public reason’ rather than simply the aggregation of citizen preferences as with representative or direct democracy.

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From its development in the 1980s and 1990s Green Political Theory or ecopolitics founded on the work of John Dryzek (1987), Robyn Eckersley (1992), Val Plumwood (1993) and Andrew Dobson (1980), participatory democracy has been viewed as a central pillar and key value, often associated with descriptions of decentralisation, grass-roots political decision-making and citizen participation, ‘strong democracy’ (Barber, 1984) and increasingly with conceptions of deliberative democracy. The value of participatory or grassroots democracy also seemed to gel with a new ecological awareness, non-violence and the concern for social justice. Green politics favoured participatory and more recently deliberative democracy because it provided a model for open debate, direct citizen involvement and emphasised grass-roots action over electoral politics. Local government is often more democratic than any other level of government. At the same time it provides education for the practice of political education instructing children and others people in the art if decision-making that is sensitive to opinions based on local knowledge and on the representation of diverse political groupings and sub-state actors. It is especially appropriate in mobilising community to gain local support for ecological projects ensuring that power is widely dispersed while also encouraging people to rebuild democracy at the local level moving towards forms of self-organisation that can collect, analyse and monitor ecological data on the local environment while hooking up to larger global concerns. In an era of authoritarian populism based on the echo-chamber of Twitter politics the only sure answer to Trump’s arrogance and world selfishness is to organise, to educate and to motivate the younger generation to take matters into their own hands, combining forms of learning with activism. Note 1 The Origins of Green Parties In Global Perspective, at http://www.ghi-dc.org/ fileadmin/user_upload/GHI_Washington/Publications/Bulletin35/35.179.pdf.

References Barber, B. (1984). Strong democracy: Participatory politics for a new age. University of California Press, 1984. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York, NY: Macmillan. Dewey, J. (1927). The public and its problems: An essay in political inquiry. Penn State Press, 2012. Dobson, A. (1980). Green politicial thought (4th ed. 2007). London & New York: Routledge. Dryzek, J. (2010). Foundations and frontiers of deliberative governance. Oxford: ­Oxford University Press. Dryzek, J. S. (1987). Rational ecology: Environment and political economy. Oxford: Blackwell.

Education for ecological democracy  83 Dryzek, J. S. (1992). Ecology and discursive democracy: Beyond liberal capitalism and the administrative state. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 3, 18–42. Dryzek, J. S. (1997). The politics of the earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eckersley, R. (1992). Environmentalism and political theory: Toward an ecocentric approach. State University of New York Press. Ester, J. (Ed.). (1998). Deliberative democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Faber, D. (1998). The struggle for ecological democracy: Environmental justice movements in the United States. New York, NY: Guilford. Guattari, F. (2000). The three ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar & Paul Sutton. ­London: The Athlone Press. Retrieved from https://monoskop.org/images/4/44/­ Guattari_Felix_The_Three_Ecologies.pdf Gutmann, A., & Thompson, D. (2002). Why deliberative democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action, vol. 1: Reason and the rationalization of society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Hester, R. (2010). Design for ecological democracy. Retrieved from http://www.­ radicaldemocracy.org/ Jackson, S. (2012). Thinking activists: Australian Greens party activists and their ­responses to leadership. Australian Journal of Political Science, 47, 593–607. Kothari, A. (2014). Radical ecological democracy: A path forward for India and ­beyond. Development, 57, 36–45. doi:10.1057/dev.2014.43 Laclau, E. (1990). New reflections on the revolution of our times. London: Verso. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (2001). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics (2nd ed.). London: Verso. Mendes, S. (2015). “Enemies at the gate” the West German – Between old ideals and new challenges. German Politics and Society, 33, 66–79. Mitchell, R. (2006). Building an empirical case for ecological democracy. Nature and Culture, 1, 149–156. Morrison, R. (1995). Ecological democracy. Boston, MA: South End Press. Peters, M. A. (2002). Anti-globalization and Guattari’s the three ecologies. In M. A. ­Peters, M. Olssen, & C. Lankshear (Eds.), Futures of critical theory: Dreams of difference (pp. 275–288). Lanham, CO: Rowman & Littlefield. Peters, M. A. (2013). Institutions, Semiotics and the politics of subjectivity. In B. ­Dillet, R. Porter, & I. Mackenzie (Eds.), The Edinburgh companion to poststructuralism (pp. 368–383). Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Peters, M. A., & González-Gaudiano, E. (2008). Introduction. In E. González-Gaudiano, & M. A. Peters (Eds.), Environmental education: Identity, politics and citizenship. Rotterdam: Sense Publications. Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. London: Routledge. Spretnak, C., & Capra, F. (1984). Green politics: The global promise. E.P. Dutton. New York, NY: Paladin, 1990. Ungaro, D. (2005). Ecological democracy: The environment and the crisis of the liberal institutions. International Review of Sociology, 15, 293–303. Young, I. M. (2000). Inclusion and democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Young, I. M. (2001). Activist challenges to deliberative democracy. Political Theory, 29, 670–690.

Chapter 8

Citizen science and post-normal science in a post-truth era Democratising knowledge; Socialising responsibility Michael A. Peters

iD

and Tina Besley

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The question of how scientific theories, concepts and methods change over time is an enduring issue. Science, like all forms of intellectual activity, can undergo rapid and dramatic periods of change, as it did during the N ­ ewtonian period sometimes called the ‘Scientific Revolution’ of the 17th century. In other times, change has been very gradual. Questions of this nature occupied Thomas Kuhn who in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) argued for a philosophical conception of scientific change based on historical evidence that questioned the standard conservative history of science as the gradual cumulative development of discoveries that took place progressively over many generations. As is well known, Kuhn characterizes the history of science in terms of periods of ‘normal science’ followed by paradigm-changing ‘revolutionary science’. Normal science is activity ruled by consensus over the problems, concepts and model solutions that together form a ‘paradigm’ or set of community understandings and procedures (a form of consensus). When problems begin to stack up and do not seem to be amendable to the accepted disciplinary solutions, they stand out as anomalies for current theory. Particularly recalcitrant anomalies come to constitute a crisis. The concept of ‘revolutionary science’ is Kuhn’s answer to the death of the old paradigm and the inception of a new one. But paradigm change is not a rational process; scientists tend to want to hold on to the metaphysical core of the old paradigm even in the face of evidence (through face-saving ad hoc hypotheses) and only reluctantly give it up when the alternatives seem unassailable. Kuhn describes the process of paradigm as more like a ‘gestalt switch’ than a rational or evidential shift based on methodological procedures. Be that as it may, the history of science in the modern period has been dominated by Kuhn’s conception and by those after him like Imre Lakatos and Larry Laudan who responded to Kuhn by describing the history of science in terms of progressive research programmes or a progression of problems. What seems common to these histories is that they all see science as an autonomous activity and picture change as a product largely of ‘internal’ developments (logic, problems, anomalies,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895-9

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etc.). Part of the novelty of Kuhn’s analysis was in providing a naturalistic account of theory change that displaced positivist explanations in terms of rules of method governing verification that many saw as constitutive of rationality. Kuhn’s legacy is undoubtedly a powerful one. His Structure book is one of the most cited books of all time. Mladenović (2017, p. 1) tries to save Kuhn from relativism and irrationality by arguing that in line with American pragmatism he argues for the rationality of science as a form of collective rationality: At the purely formal level, Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality prohibits obviously irrational beliefs and choices and requires reason-­responsiveness as well as the uninterrupted pursuit of inquiry. At the substantive, historicized level, it rests on a distinctly pragmatist mode of justification compatible with a notion of contingent but robust scientific progress. Science changes through its own historical evolution through largely disciplinary mechanisms both formal and contingent, yet it also changes through historical forces that impact upon its conditions of possibility, through larger economic, social and technological historical factors sometimes referred to as ‘social studies of science’, an academic field that grown considerably since the 1970s that replaces epistemological questions with social ones.1 In this vein, Collins and Evans (2010, p. 300) entertain the problem of legitimacy to ask a question about expertise rather than truth: ‘If it is no longer clear that scientists and technologists have special access to the truth, why should their advice be specially valued?’ And they probe the ‘Problem of Extension’: ‘How far should participation in technical decision-making extend?’ In addition, the approach from political economy proceeds from the assumption that technical change has radically altered economic development it has become essential to understanding the sources, nature and consequences of innovation in science and economic development. In the current digital era, science faces three major kinds of changes and challenges that originate outside it. First, the accelerating effects of technology-­ driven developments that signal the critical term ‘techno-science’ is perhaps even more descriptively accurate than when it was introduced decades ago. On the standard view, technology, was always seen to be the application of science, but the traditional theory-practice understanding of the relationship of science and technology no longer holds and is often seen in an inverted relationship to science with technology dominant. Notably, Heidegger (1977) reversed the idea that modern science was the foundation of technology, ­arguing that the technological essence is the source of the form and function of science. Early usage by philosophers like Jean-Francois Lyotard and Bruno Latour used the term ‘techno-science’ to express a critical reaction against the theoretical conception of contemporary science that was philosophically blind to the importance of technology.

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As a contemporary example, it might be argued that current US-China trade wars are driven by newly emergent conceptions of ‘techno-development’ and ‘techno-nationalism’ (Peters, 2018). For instance, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) released its report March, 2018 Findings of The Investigation into China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation Under Section 301 of The Trade Act of 19742 indicating that the stakes involved in a collection of next generation strategic technologies including AI and quantum computing determine the future of scientific innovation in the global economy. As one commentator remarks: Techno-nationalism marries two trends that are central to our current historical moment. First, the remarkable acquisition of power through data and ‘network effects’ of just a few companies based mainly near San ­Francisco, and the escalating battle between these companies and Chinese rivals. And second, the decline of the post-1945 Western-led world order. (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45370052) Second, a set of co-evolving technologies have created ‘convergence science’ based on the ‘nano-bio-info-cogno’ paradigm that together define a creative synergy shaping both the next stage of science and an advanced stage of the knowledge society.3 The National Science Foundation describes convergence science as: …a means of solving vexing research problems, in particular, complex problems focusing on societal needs. It entails integrating knowledge, methods, and expertise from different disciplines and forming novel frameworks to catalyse scientific discovery and innovation. Convergence research is related to other forms of research that span disciplines—transdisciplinarity, ­interdisciplinarity, and multidisciplinarity. Third, we are witnessing the emergence of ‘post-normal science’, a term introduced into the discourse by Funtowicz and Ravetz (1992) in the early 1990s, to signal the notional shift to an ecological systems perspective and the scientific management of uncertainty and of quality. Some critics interpreted this as the shift from ‘truth’ to ‘quality assurance’. Fourth, there has been a rapid growth of what is referred to as Open Science or Science 2.0 that uses new technologies to increase and explore the democratization of and citizen participation in science (Peters & Heraud, 2015; Wals & Peters, 2018). As Halkay (2015) observes, The past decade has witnessed a sustained growth in the scope and scale of participation of people from outside established research organizations, in all aspects of scientific research. This includes forming research questions,

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recording observations, analysing data, and using the resulting knowledge. This phenomenon has come to be known as citizen science. While the origins of popular involvement in the scientific enterprise can be traced to the early days of modern science, the scale and scope of the current wave of engagement shifts citizen science from the outer margins of scientific activities to the centre—and thus calls for attention from policymakers. The European Commissions’ (2014) Green Paper on Citizen Science entitled ‘Citizen Science for Europe: Towards a better society of empowered citizens and enhanced research’ puts the argument powerfully in terms of a paradigm shift towards a more open research process where ‘new participative and networked relationships promote the transformation of the scientific system, allowing collective intelligence and new collaborative knowledge creation, democratizing research and leading into emergence of new disciplines and connections.’ Citizen science is but one manifestation of a larger movement for openness that has determining effects for science and its reception. The movement for Open Access Science such as Plan S,4 is a recent initiative from cOAlition S backed by Science Europe to make full and immediate Open Access to publiclyfunded research publications a reality by 1 January 2020 that will have a deep impact on the distribution of scientific knowledge and on current science publishing models. In one sense this is a pinnacle development of the OA movement which itself is part of the broader movement of openness in science and education (Peters, 2013, 2014; Peters & Britez, 2008; Peters & Roberts, 2012). The fact that science, like economic development, is now technology-driven is a massive change with profound significance especially for science as a public endeavour. We can parse this idea further by reference to the US National Science Foundation that has been theorising ‘convergent technologies’ as a new techno-scientific synergy for well over a decade. The convergence is sometimes referred to as the ‘nano-bio-info-cogno’ paradigm that together have the power to define the next stage of science and an advanced knowledge society.5 These technologies are not restricted to new digital technologies but embrace a set of converging technologies, including (briefly): ‘Nano’ - the branch of technology that deals with dimensions and tolerances of less than 100 nanometers, especially the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules; ‘Bio’, the exploitation of biological processes for industrial and other purposes, especially the genetic manipulation of microorganisms for the production of antibiotics, hormones, etc.; ‘Cogno’, the convergence of nano, bio and IT for brain science, sensing and mind control; ‘Info’, information technologies developing with new quantum computing. Sometimes referred to as ‘NBIC technologies’ (Nano, Bio, Information, Cognitive), this convergence is seen as a doubleedged sword ‘empowering both our creative and our destructive natures’. The National Science Foundation (NSF) have many published reports exploring the convergence of the NBIC technologies including the chief

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application areas of (i) expanding human cognition and communication; (ii) Improving human health and physical capabilities; (iii) Enhancing group and societal outcomes (iv) Strengthening national security, and (v) Unifying science and education. Nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and new technologies based in cognitive science (NBIC) signify an emerging harmony among the sciences, and a model of the ‘unity of nature at the nanoscale’ (e.g. Bainbridge, 2016; Bainbridge & Roco, 2006, 2016). We are told that recent advances in nanoscience and nanotechnology enable a rapid convergence of other sciences and technologies for the first time in human history with significant developments in biomedicine at the nanoscale (such as genetic engineering), nanoelectronics, and cognitive science, which holds the greatest promise but is the field least mature. (Significantly the claim is made that sociology and political science have not participated significantly in the development of cognitive science). The major claim is that ‘science based on the unified concepts on matter at the nanoscale provides a new foundation for knowledge creation, innovation, and technology integration’ (ibid.). This ‘convergence science’ must be understood also by reference to the larger realities of Industry 4.0 and _the fourth industrial revolution’ that are closely related with the Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber Physical System(CPS), information and communications technology (ICT), Enterprise Architecture (EA), and Enterprise Integration (EI). Industry 4.0 is often referred to in terms of the integration of complex physical machinery and devices with networked sensors and software and as such represents ‘a new level of value chain organization and management across the lifecycle of products’ (Henning and Johannes). This rapid technological change is often conceived in terms of the power to disrupt economies and societies. Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014) in The Second Machine Age have commented that the computer revolution has huge potential for disrupting labour markets and reducing labour costs. They talk of the watershed in robotization and the corresponding increasing capacity and intelligence of digital technologies which has wider societal effects than solely altering the way science is practiced: digitization is going to bring with it some thorny challenges…. Rapid and accelerating digitization is likely to bring economic rather than environmental disruption, stemming from the fact that as computers get more powerful, companies have less need for some kinds of workers. Technological progress is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people, as it races ahead. (p. 11) The focus on the political economy of digitalization is important for understanding the transformed environment within which science is now practiced. There is a single planetary technical system that enables access to global markets

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in instantaneous real time creating truly globally scaled markets that dwarf the scale of the first industrial/colonial system and exponentially speeds up all transactions. The single planetary system is an integrated system that includes the scientific community through global science publishing by the big eight and the larger networks they help comprise with university consortia and ranking agencies. A fundamental difference is that this single system perfected and refined reaching into every corner of the world no longer works on simple cause and effect and therefore is not a linear system but rather emulates natural systems to become dynamic and transformative, demonstrating the properties of chaotic and complex systems that at the same time increase volatility, interconnectivity and unpredictability. The Chief Science Advisor during the last National government administration in New Zealand, Sir Peter Gluckman, gave an interesting speech at the Public Communication of Science and Technology Conference 2018, held in Dunedin, (3–6 April), entitled ‘Knowledge brokerage in an age of rapid technological change.’6 He reflected on his role as a ‘broker’ and science communicator between the science community and the policy community, two very different cultures which, as he also points out, are based on different processes and open to different influences. He notes also how science alone, contrary to popular opinion, ‘will not resolve different world views’ yet such world views often act as the schema through which people interpret data and evidence. He acknowledges that new disruptive sciencedriven technologies are rapidly growing – ‘artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data, robotics, internet of things, autonomous vehicles, nanotechnology, gene editing, brain enhancement drugs, meiotic gene driven, bioelectronic implants, synthetic biology and geoengineering are some of the most obvious’. Together they increase the complexity of science and policy making and have the power to undermine democracy (Ed. or assist it). This is a new world of uncertainty especially in a ‘post-trust’ and ‘post-truth’ society: as he notes, ‘The nature of the scientific method means that one can never absolutely prove anything to be completely safe. And no innovation is possible without some acceptance of uncertainty.’ As a practicing scientist— a NZ paediatrician with an interest in endocrinology—Gluckman explains the dramatic changes to science in the last 30 years as a result of the digital revolution: The result of computational development on one hand (including the emergence now of big data) and the molecular sciences on the other have changed what science is possible. An increasing amount of science, is now framed within systems thinking which moves us from certainty to probabilistic approaches. As a result of these changes we are also moving from what’s been called normal to post-normal science, where the science is complex and where there is a high values component that is often in dispute. (p. 4)

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It is surprising that in the year of the NZ Royal Society Centenary (2018) that he should use the term ‘post-normal science’ (PNS) and ‘post-trust’, with a clear set of references to ‘post-truth’ and Trump’s anti-science policies, and his unilateral withdrawal from the Paris environmental accord. (Even in a world of uncertainty as government a spokes-person one has to be careful not to offend against supposed allies). Glucksman’s argument is one for the enhanced role of science communication to mediate between the two specialised communities of science and policy. We were interested in his speech for another reason—for its contemporaneity and his use as the then Chief Scientist of PNS and ‘posttruth’. Gluckman (2018) cautions us: But citizen science in whatever form is not enough. We need to take lessons from the language and scholarship of post-normal science: the answer must lie in concepts like extended peer review, co-design and co-production. These are critical but complex and controversial concepts but they will be a large part of the future of science. The Fourth PNS conference ‘Post-normal science as a movement: between informed critical resistance, reform and the making of futures’ held in Barcelona, 15–17 November 2018 began with this quote from Gluckman (above) and provided the following briefing that is worth referring to in full: Science, as it stands today, faces a crisis of public and political trust, combined with an inner erosion of standards of quality and integrity. Scientific findings are increasingly recognised as neither as reliable nor reproducible as they used to be portrayed. Beliefs in and self-declarations of the disinterestedness of scientific endeavours, separated from vested interest, political agenda or social and cultural context are recognised as empirically and philosophically problematic. Scientific elites are, for better or for worse, challenged by an erosion of trust on a par with that experienced by political elites in modern societies. Scientific institutions charged with higher education face demands of high societal relevance and impact which they do not know how to meet and how to prepare for. This crisis on multiple fronts calls for a fundamental reform. Post-normal science (PNS) offers direction to such a reform, as a critical concept challenging mainstream practices of science, as an inspiration for new styles of research practice, and as an inspiration and support for new conventions of research quality assurance that better respond to the post-normal conditions of today’s societal challenges. This multifaceted nature of PNS is both descriptive and normative. It provides a framework for describing and diagnosing urgent decision problems—post-normal issues—characterized by incomplete, uncertain or contested knowledge and high decision stakes, and critical reflection on how these characteristics change the relationship

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between science and governance. At the same time, PNS inspires a movement of critical resistance and reform towards a new style of scientific inquiry and practice that is reflexive, inclusive (in the sense that it seeks upstream engagement of extended peer communities) and transparent in regards to scientific uncertainty, ignorance, values and framings, and moving into a direction of democratisation of expertise.7 It is useful to list the themes that were to be discussed at PNS 4 that were designed in part to address Gluckman’s concerns:

• PNS as a critical concept for informed resistance and reform (What strate-

gies of resistance and what of reform or Reformation does PNS care about? What, when, where, why each of them? Resisting what, by/for/against whom, and why?) • Ethics and matters of care in quantification, algorithms and big data (­responsible quantification, use of quantitative evidence in policy making; post-normal perspectives on algorithms, big data, machine learning and AI) • Tools and practices in knowledge quality assessment and extended peer communities (deliberation support tools for informed multi actor dialogues; which actors and how? Empowering marginalized actors) • Post-normal literacy (building societal resilience to sloppy science, conspiracy theories, and post-truth phenomena; best practices for open science, quality assurance of extended facts) • Puzzling value landscapes (responsibility, dignity, integrity, and other values) • PNS in the making of futures (anticipation, path dependency, defending humanity) Clearly, the issue of trust has become an outstanding issue, one that is paramount in the era of ‘post-truth’ when Trump’s administration has encouraged a scepticism against science that some critics view as anti-science and a flagrant disregard for the concept of truth (Peters et al., 2018).8 These conferences framings are significant for the ways they inform us of the concerns of practicing scientists in an era where science is up against ‘alternative facts’ and open to gross political interference and interpretation. It is these concerns that motivate Nick Enfield (2017)9 writing in The Guardian to suggest: While we might debate the wisdom of trusting political insiders, the suspicion of specialists and experts has begun to contaminate a much bigger ecology of knowledge and practice in our society. The result is posttruth discourse. In our new normal, experts are dismissed, alternative facts are (sometimes flagrantly) offered, and public figures can offer opinions on pretty much anything.

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Enfield documents the pro-truth countermovement with over 600 cities participating in the global March for Science on Earth Day in April 2017 with thousands signing the pro-truth pledge to share, honour and encourage truth.10 The term ‘post-normal science’ requires some background. Funtowicz and Ravetz (2003) make the statement that in policy world of risk and environment ‘a new type of science—‘post-normal’—is emerging.’ They go on to make the comparison with traditional problem-solving science by reference to ‘systems uncertainties and decision stakes’: Postnormal science is appropriate when either attribute is high; then the traditional methodologies are ineffective. In those circumstances, the quality assurance of scientific inputs to the policy process requires an ‘extended peer community’, consisting of all those with a stake in the dialogue on the issue. Post-normal science can provide a path to the democratization of science, and also a response to the current tendencies to post-modernity. (p. 739) As Karpińska (2018) comments everything is now post-normal and the definition that Funtowicz and Ravetz gave almost 30 years ago ‘is reaching the peak of its popularity.’ Post-normal science as they proposed it was the scientific model on how to deal with policy-driven issues like global warming bringing together members of the science and policy communities and combining democratic consensus machinery with the pursuit of science: ‘Funtowicz and Ravetz try to overtake these conflicts by reformulating the aim of knowledge from the truth to the quality of the epistemic process. They suggest expanding the research community to extended peer communities.’ In exploring the origin of the concept, she cites Funtowicz and Ravetz’s early paper (1992): One way forward would be to realize that the technological system that has created the problems cannot be simply adapted for achieving their solution. Then there would need to be a radical transformation of the science-based technology that is deployed on such global problems; we have described this as post-normal science. (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1992, p. 972) The situation for PNS has become more difficult with the rise of ‘post-truth politics’ as Rose (2018) indicates in his article ‘Avoiding a Post-truth World: Embracing Post-normal Conservation’. He suggests that conservation science has always been post-normal and he encourages scientists to develop co-­productive relationships with decision makers to harness narratives to engage with people on a personal level. He analyses the rise of post-truth politics as follows: In the aftermath of unexpected election results in the UK and USA, and threats to pull out of international environmental agreements, the science

Citizen science and post-normal science in a post-truth era  93

community has struggled with a decision-making environment that seems to undervalue the importance of scientific evidence. It has been claimed that selective, or biased, use of evidence may be enhanced by the rise of nationalistic governments across the globe (Ross & Jones, 2016), who put forward arguments in favour of their own citizens, even in the face of the global sciencebased accords such as the Paris Climate Change Agreement (Tollefson, Morello, & Reardon, 2016). According to some, decisions about conservation and the environment can also be post-truth (Begon, 2017) as policy-makers selectively use, or ignore, scientific evidence to support political arguments. (p. 518) In part, these arguments analysing the increasing politicized environment of conservation science underlies the collection Sustainability Science: Key Issues edited by Ariane Königand Jerome Ravetz as a textbook, as the blurb says, of ‘how one might actively design, engage in, and guide collaborative processes for transforming human-environment-technology interactions, whilst embracing complexity, contingency, uncertainties, and contradictions emerging from diverse values and world views.’11 In ‘Flowers of resistance: Citizen science, ecological democracy and the transgressive education paradigm’, an orienting chapter by Arjen E. J. Wals and myself, we outline the concept of ecological democracy and the contribution of citizen science to ‘transgressive educational paradigm’ (Wals & Peters, 2018). The book is divided into three parts: ‘Embracing complexity and alternative futures: Conceptual tools and methods’; ‘What might transformations look like? Sectoral challenges and interdependence’; and, ‘Tracking, steering and judging transformation’. König in her introductory essay explains ‘Sustainability as a transformative social learning process’.12 In our chapter we noted the conceptual and historical link between citizen science and ecological democracy: From its development in the 1980s and 1990s Green Political Theory (GPT) or ecopolitics founded on the work of Dryzek (1987), Eckersley (1992), Plumwood (1993) and Dobson (1980), participatory democracy has been viewed as a central pillar and key value, often associated with descriptions of decentralization, grassroots political decision-making and citizen participation, ‘strong democracy’ (Barber, 1997) and increasingly with conceptions of deliberative democracy. The value of participatory or grassroots democracy also seemed to gel with a new ecological awareness, non-violence and the concern for social justice. Green politics favoured participatory and more recently deliberative democracy because it provided a model for open debate, direct citizen involvement and emphasized grassroots action over electoral politics. Permitted the use of data controlled by governments and large corporations we might be entering a new era characterized by the cooperation and

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coordination of amateur and professional scientists and driven by ‘big data’. Enhanced computing and computation power along with big and linked data demonstrate a promising mix of local and global, humans and machines, humans and nature in the transgressive pedagogical paradigm that moves beyond the old industrial scientific model of applied science based on the expert specialist. This relatively new transformative approach can be traced back to a post-normal science perspective (Ravetz, 2004) based on a set of principles: 1 encouragement of citizens’ involvement in science: citizen science is a useful model for co-produced public good science that recognises that citizens need to have both ‘voice’ and agency in science matters, especially as it effects local environment, and increases the democratisation of science and reduces the cultural distance between the expert and the citizen furthering the aim of science communication of complex policy issues; 2 recognition and support for multiple ways of knowing and different types of knowledge: indigenous knowledge based on long term stewardship and cultural rights of environment, include multiple perspectives that involve spiritual values and ‘environmental being as a way of life’; ‘local knowledge’ based on long term experience also has a strong role to play in on-going environmental assessment; 3 improving sustainability requires social learning and deliberation between the multiple stakeholders/actors affected environmental failure (scientists being one of many); and development of ‘sensitive’ peer review systems that represent ‘other’ stakeholders; 4 requires a more activist kind of learning that not only uses standard methodologies to map and monitor the local environment and generate accurate data by scientifically accepted methods but also takes concerted action as a form of collective responsibility in line with local council and government objectives. The European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) have promoted high quality citizen science through sharing existing examples of good practice and developing practitioner guides to support the citizen science practitioner community to develop partnerships, share resources and experiences, and build capacity within the sector.13 ECSA also offered ten principles adopted and modified by the Australian CSA: 10 Principles of Citizen Science 1 Citizen science projects actively involve citizens in scientific endeavour that generates new knowledge or understanding. 2 Citizen science projects have a genuine science outcome. 3 Citizen science provides benefits to both science and society. 4 Citizen scientists may participate in various stages of the scientific process. 5 Citizen scientists receive feedback from the project.

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6 Citizen science, as with all forms of scientific inquiry, has limitations and biases that should be considered and controlled for. 7 Where possible and suitable, project data and meta-data from citizen science projects are made publicly available and results are published in an open access format. 8 Citizen scientists are suitably acknowledged by projects. 9 Citizen science programs offer a range of benefits and outcomes which should be acknowledged and considered in project evaluation. 10 The leaders of citizen science projects take into consideration legal and ethical considerations of the project. https://citizenscience.org.au/10-principles-of-citizen-science/ This is a little too prescriptive, perhaps, and we ought not to institutionalise or ossify the movement so that it prevents organic change within the movement. Citizen science needs to acknowledge its philosophical origins in open science and pragmatic models based on the logic of community of inquiry after Dewey and Peirce. Watson and Floridi (2018) provide a useful analysis of Zooniverse, the world’s largest citizen science web portal showing ‘how information and communication technologies enhance the reliability, scalability, and connectivity of crowdsourced eresearch, giving online citizen science projects powerful epistemic advantages over more traditional modes of scientific investigation’. In their introduction, they write: Experts and amateurs have been collaborating on so-called ‘citizen science’ projects for more than a century (Silvertown, 2009). Traditionally, such projects relied upon volunteers to participate in data collection. In more recent years, the spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has allowed users to become increasingly involved in data analysis. Early online citizen science initiatives made use of participants’ spare processing power to create distributed computing networks to run simulations or perform other complex functions (Anderson, Cobb, Korpela, Lebofsky, & Werthimer, 2002). The latest wave of citizen science projects has replaced this passive software approach with interactive web platforms designed to maximise user engagement. Utilising fairly simple tools provided by welldesigned websites, amateurs have helped model complex protein structures (Khatib et al., 2011a, b), map the neural circuitry of the mammalian retina (Kim et al., 2014), and discover new astronomical objects (Cardamone et al., 2009; Lintott et al., 2009). As of December 2015, citizen science project aggregator SciStarter links to over a thousand active projects. SciStarter (2015) The top ten citizen science projects of 2015, https://blog.scistarter.org/2016/01/ top-ten-citizen-science-projects-of-2015/ Watson and Floridi (2018) talk of ‘crowdsourced e-research’ and seek the philosophical implications of this new brand. In their study of Zooniverse, they

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produce a Diagram of sociotechnical knowledge production in Zooniverse, noting ‘how technology permeates every step in the knowledge production chain.’ They conclude: We cannot be certain just what scientific developments the future holds in store, but we can be confident that many of our next great discoveries will be made thanks to some complex partnership of minds and machines. Whether or not such results are the product of crowdsourcing, thorough investigation of this strange and remarkable methodology sheds new light on the varied modes of human knowledge. Clearly the time has come to endorse a sociotechnical turn in the philosophy of science that com- bines insights from statistics and logic to analyse the latest developments in scientific research. (p. 760) While more attention needs to be paid to the ‘sociotechnical turn’ it is important to note that there is a conception of citizen science that is based on a dual accountability relationship of science to democracy: (i) opening up science policy processes and promoting a responsiveness of science to the needs of citizens, while at the same time (ii) engaging citizens in communication about science and tutoring them in large-scale research projects through virtual education and collaborative participation in scientific research projects. There is a related philosophical literature that discusses both democracy as the use of social intelligence to solve problems of practical interest, and the epistemic powers of democratic institutions, that has a long history in pragmatism going back at least to Dewey. There is a great deal of variety in epistemic approaches to democracy but that they are all derived from the value of free public discourse that epistemologically guides political practice (­Estlund, 2008). For example, in Peirce’s account of the logic of the ‘community of inquiry’ scientific inquiry is taken to be justified not because it is infallible but because it is self-correcting. For Peirce, the idea of truth is based on consensus reached in the long term by a community of inquirers. Peer production and crowdsourcing as modalities of collective intelligence are exemplified in the interactions between online participants who share and self-organize activities in decentralized ways that are often not dominated by the profit motive. They can be seen to embody Perice’s ideals. Indeed, peer production has come about through the development of distributed and decentralized organizational forms that have not required financial incentives of markets or coercive obligations of bureaucracies and as such escape the distortions of the market, one of its major contributions in an age of sponsored corporate research. Peer production can be thought of as social innovation that has arisen as a result of internet-based networked systems and online platforms that broaden, deepen and extend the concept of ‘peer’ to include all ‘stakeholders’ in policy processes, including local citizens directly or indirectly affected by

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decisions. Increasingly, citizens will become active in science projects (some more than others) and also active in the science policy processes and its evaluation through the technology-mediated co-production of social goods (Peters & Heraud, 2015). Notes 1 See Society for the Social Studies of Science and scholarly resources that constitute the field, http://www.4sonline.org/resources/journals 2 https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/Section%20301%20FINAL.PDF 3 Convergence Research at NSF https://www.nsf.gov/od/oia/convergence/ index.jsp; The Convergence Revolution http://www.convergencerevolution.net/ 4 https://www.coalition-s.org/ 5 Peters (2018) The Challenges of Technological Unemployment and the Future of Digital Society, keynote at Cultivation of Core Competencies in a Changing Technological Society’, INEI 2018 Symposium, November 20-22 Beijing Norma University, The 11th International Network of Educational Institutes (INEI) Annual Symposium. 6 https://www.pmcsa.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/18-04-06-Knowledge-­ brokerage-in-an-age-of-rapid-technological-change.pdf 7 ‘This fourth PNS symposium [PNS1 in Bergen, NO, PNS2 in Ispra, IT (summarized in a recent special issue of Futures) and PNS3 in Tübingen, DE (video presentations available here)] provides a platform to discuss and explore the guidance that post-normal science can offer in finding a way out of the present crisis in and around science. 8 The third PNS conference was devoted to issues of trust in a post-truth world: ‘“Post-truth” and a crisis of trust? Perspectives from post-normal science and extended citizen participation. This third PNS Symposium intends to provide a space for discussing the current predicament of declining trust, increasing complexity and uncertainty in the science-society interfaces by deploying a variety of critical framings including, but not limited to, those inspired by post-normal science.’ It continues: ‘Discussions of recent political events – most notably the presidential election in the United States and the referendum in the United Kingdom to (Br)exit the European Union -frequently refer to ideas of “post-truth”, “post-evidence” or “post-factual” politics. In its ambiguity, the idea of a “posttruth” age manifests a crisis of trust in both democratic and scientific institutions. At the same time, it implies the untenable assumption that politics and policies were once, and should be again, based on a unique truth provided by science (comprising the whole spectrum of natural and social sciences, and humanities). Since the early 1990s, the postnormal science approach has been applied to issues in the science-society interfaces characterised by uncertainty and complexity, including a plurality of legitimate perspectives. These cases have been described in terms of uncertain facts, high stakes, disputed values and urgent decisions. In light of this, the conception of science as a privileged “act-provider” for governance seems increasingly unsatisfying and problematic’, https://www.uib.no/ svt/109437/%E2%80%98post-truth%E2%80%99-and-crisis-trust 9 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/17/were-in-apost-truth-world-with-eroding-trust-and-accountability-it-cant-end-well 10 https://www.protruthpledge.org/ 11 https://www.routledge.com/Sustainability-Science-Key-Issues-1st-Edition/ Konig-Ravetz/p/book/9781138659285

98  Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley 12 König provides a useful account of Sustainability Science at https://www.­ routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/sustainability/sustainability_science.php 13 https://ecsa.citizen-science.net/taxonomy/term/205

Orcid Michael A. Peters iD http://orcid.org//0000-0002-1482-2975 Tina Besley iD http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4377-1257

References Anderson, D. P., Cobb, J., Korpela, E., Lebofsky, M., & Werthimer, D. (2002). SETI@ home: An experiment in public resource computing. Communications of the ACM, 45, 56–61. doi:10.1145/581571.581573 Bainbridge, W. S. (2016). Dimensions of research. In W. S. Bainbridge, & Roco M. C. (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology convergence (pp. 125–138). Berlin: Springer. Bainbridge, W. S., & Roco, M. C. (Eds.). (2006). Progress in convergence: Technologies for human wellbeing. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Bainbridge, W. S., & Roco, M. C. (2016). Science and technology convergence: With emphasis for nanotechnologyinspired convergence. Journal of Nanoparticle Research, 18, 211. Barber (1997). Strong democracy participatory politics for a new age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Begon, M. (2017). Mike begon: Winning public arguments as ecologists: Time for a new doctrine? Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 32, 394–396. Brynjolfsson, E., & McFee, A. (2014). The second machine age: Work, progress, and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Cardamone, C., Schawinski, K., Sarzi, M., Bamford, S. P., Bennert, N., Urry, C. M. … VandenBerg, J. (2009). Galaxy zoo green peas: Discovery of a class of compact extremely star-forming galaxies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 399, 1191–1205. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.15383.x Collins, H. M., & Evans, R. J. 2010. The third wave of science Studies: Studies of expertise and experience. In: D. Sergio, & P. Juhno (Eds.), Themes in transdisciplinary research (pp. 299–363). IEAT. Dobson, A. (1980). Green politicial thought (4th edn., 2007), London & New York: Routledge. Dobson 1990 Dryzek, J. S. (1987). Rational ecology: Environment and political economy. Oxford: Blackwell. Eckersley, R. (1992). Environmentalism and political theory: Toward an ecocentric approach. New York: State University of New York Press. Enfield, N. (2017) We’re in a post-truth world with eroding trust and accountability, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/17/ were-in-apost-truth-world-with-eroding-trust-and-accountability-it-cant-end-well Estlund, D. (2008). Introduction: Epistemic approaches to democracy. Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology, 5, 1–4. doi:10.3366/E1742360008000191

Citizen science and post-normal science in a post-truth era  99 Funtowicz, S. O., & Ravetz, J. R. (1992). The good, the true and the post-modern. Futures, 24, 963–976. doi:10.1016/0016-3287(92)90131-X. Funtowicz, S. O., & Ravetz, J. R. (2003). Post-normal science. In online encyclopaedia of ecological economics, edited by International Society for Ecological Economics. Retrieved from http://isecoeco.org/pdf/pstnormsc.pdf Gluckman, P. (2018) Knowledge brokerage in an age of rapid technological change. Public Communication of Science and Technology Conference, Dunedin, 3 -6 April.https:// informedfutures.org/wp-content/uploads/18-04-06-Knowledge-brokerage-in-an-ageof-rapid-technological-change.pdf Halkay, M. (2015). Citizen science and policy: A European perspective. Retrieved from https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/Citizen_Science_Policy_European_Perspective_Haklay.pdf Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology. In D. F. Krell (Ed.), Basic writings. New York: Harper & Row. Retrieved from https://www.nsf.gov/ crssprgm/nano/reports/MCR_16-0714_Convergence%20Science_19p.pdf Karpińska, A. (2018). Post-normal science. The escape of science: From truth to quality? Social Epistemology, 32, 338–350. doi:10.1080/02691728.2018.1531157 Khatib, F., Cooper, S., Tyka, M. D., Xu, K., Makedon, I., Baker, D. … Players, F. (2011a). Algorithm discovery by protein folding game players. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(47), 18949–18953. Khatib, F., DiMaio, F., Cooper, S., Kazmierczyk, M., Gilski, M., & Baker, D.Foldit Contenders GroupFoldit Void Crushers Group (2011b). Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players. Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, 18(10), 1175–1177. Kim, J. S., Greene, M. J., Zlateski, A., Lee, K., Richardson, M., Turaga, S. C. … Purcaro, M. (2014). Space-time wiring specificity supports direction selectivity in the retina. Nature, 509(7500), 331–336. Kuhn, T. (1962/1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1970, 2nd edition, with postscript). Lintott, C. J., Schawinski, K., Keel, W., van Arkel, H., Bennert, N., Edmondson, E. … Vandenberg, J.. (2009). Galaxy zoo: ‘Hanny’s Voorwerp’, a quasar light echo? Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 399, 129–140. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.15299.x Mladenović, B. (2017). Kuhn’s legacy: Epistemology, metaphilosophy, and pragmatism. New York: Columbia University Press. Peters, M. A. (2013). Education, science and knowledge capitalism: Creativity and the promise of openness. New York: Peter Lang. Peters, M. A. (2014). Openness and the Intellectual Commons, Open Review of Educational Research, 1:1, 1-7, DOI: 10.1080/23265507.2014.984975 Peters, M. A. (2018). Trade wars, technology transfer, and the future Chinese technostate. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1. doi:10.1080/00131857.2018.1546109 Peters, M. A., Rider, S., Hyvonen, M., Besley, T. (2018) Post-Truth, Fake News: Viral Modernity and Higher Education. Springer. Peters, M. A., & Britez, R. (Eds.). (2008). Open education and education for openness. Rotterdam & Taipei: Sense Publishers. Retrieved from https://www.sensepublishers.com/media/729-open-education-and-education-for-openness.pdf

100  Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley Peters, M. A., & Heraud, R. (2015). Toward a political theory of social innovation: Collective intelligence and the cocreation of social goods. Journal of Self Governance and Management Economics, 3, 7–23. Peters, M. A., Peter, R., Rider, S., Hyvönen, M., & Besley, T. (Eds.). (2012). Posttruth, fake news: Viral modernity & higher education. Singapore: Springer Nature. Peters, M. A., & Roberts, P. (2012). Virtues of openness: Education, science, and scholarship in the digital age. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. London: Routledge. Ravetz, J. (2004). The post-normal science of precaution. Futures, 36, 347–357. Rose, D. C. (2018). Avoiding a post-truth world: Embracing post-normal conservation. Conservation & Society, 16, 518–524. Ross, A., & Jones, R. (2016). Connections and tensions between nationalist and sustainability discourses in the Scottish legislative process. Journal of Law and Society, 43, 228–256. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6478.2016.00750.x SciStarter (2015) The top ten citizen science projects of 2015, https://blog.scistarter. org/2016/01/top-ten-citizen-science-projects-of-2015/ Silvertown, J. (2009). A new dawn for citizen science. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 24, 467–471. The European Commission (2014). Green Paper on Citizen Science, Citizen Science for Europe: Towards a better society of empowered citizens and enhanced research. Retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/green-papercitizen-science-europe-towards-society-empowered-citizens-and-enhanced-research Tollefson, J., Morello, L., & Reardon, S. (2016). Donald Trump’s US election win stuns scientists. Nature. doi: 10.1038/nature.2016.20952. Wals, A. E. J., & Peters, M. A. (2018). Flowers of resistance: Citizen science, ecological democracy and the transgressive education paradigm. In A. König, & J. Ravetz (Eds.), Sustainability science. London: Routledge. Watson, D., & Floridi, L. (2018). Crowdsourced science: Sociotechnical epistemology in the e-research paradigm. Synthese, 195, 741. Retrieved from doi:10.1007/ s11229-016-1238-2

Chapter 9

Cultural Apocalypse, Western colonial domination and ‘the End of the World’ Michael A. Peters, Chengbing Wang, Carl Mika and Steve Fuller

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere…. Nietzsche, F. (1968). The will to power. Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale. (Trans.). Vintage Books, p. 3.

‘The apocalyptic problematic in Italian anthropology’ In ‘The apocalyptic problematic in Italian anthropology: from Vittorio Lanternari to Ernesto De Martino’ Marcello Massenzio and Andrea Alessandri (­Massenzio & Alessandri, 2013) focus on Vittorio Lanternari’s work as an approach to cultural history informed by ethnology where religion is viewed as a cultural production inseparable from the unfolding of histories of particular societies. It is an approach that ‘singles out the history of religions in the Italian intellectual field’ (p. 127) inhabited by Lanternari himself, Raffaelle ­Pettazzoni, who reputedly founded the field, and his ‘close colleague’, ­Ernesto De Martino. As they explain Lanternari’s most famous work Movimenti ­religiosi di libertà e di salvezza dei popoli oppressi (1960), with a dedication to Pettazzoni: focuses on the ‘awakening’ of oppressed peoples, on their rebellion against Western colonial domination which takes the form of prophetic movements of a millenarian type, aspiring to a world order founded on radically new bases and involving the end of the world as it is. De Martino (1964), four years later publishes his essay ‘Apocalissi culturali e Apocalissi psicopatologiche’, interpreted in English as ‘Cultural Apocalypse and Apocalyptic Psychopathology’, in which he speculates about apocalypse as the end of the world within different civilizations, which at once includes Lanternari’s accent on apocalypse and the ruinous calamity that Spanish colonization presented for Aztecs, Maya and Toltecs after first contact in the thirteenth DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895-10

102  Michael A. Peters, Chengbing Wang, Carl Mika, et al.

century, but goes beyond to make use of ethological data to consider the meaning of apocalypse for Western culture itself. De Martino’s (1964) essay ‘anticipates in a completed mode the research program, the methodology and the theoretical system’ of his unfinished work published posthumously as The end of the world. La fine del mondo: Contributo all’analisi delle apocalissi culturali (De Martino, 2002) which rests on the distinction between the end of the world without a new beginning (without an eschaton) and apocalypse with an eschaton implying cultural apocalypses, in the plural and admitting a comparative and ethological context, that may also imply a new beginning, as the Marxist apocalypse requires ‘the end of the bourgeois world as a prerequisite for building a classless society’ (17). They quote from De Martino (2002), a work not yet translated into English; The theme [of the current end of the world] is not necessarily linked to religious life as it is traditionally understood but can emerge – as is the case with modern and contemporary versions of the apocalypse within bourgeois society in crisis – in the profane sphere of arts, literature, philosophical thought and customs. It does not necessarily imply the earthly end of human existence, but may instead refer to the social and political aspect of the end of a certain historical world and the advent of a better historical world, as is the case of the Marxist apocalypse. […] As a theme of historical-cultural and anthropological research, the ‘end of the world’ refers to the confrontation of four types of documentation. The apocalyptic material of the modern and contemporary West founds the primary impulse of the research and constitutes its permanent point of reference, unification and control or, in other words, the theme of the end which is as much an expression of the crisis of bourgeois society, than the expression of the end of bourgeois society in the perspective of the Marxist apocalyptic. Second, there is the apocalyptic documentation of the Judeo-Christian tradition (…). Thirdly, there is the apocalyptic documentation of the great historical religions, linked to the myth of the periodic destruction and regeneration of the world. In the fourth place, finally, we find the ethnological documentation of the current prophetic and millenarian religious movements of the so-called primitive cultures, subjected to the violent shock of the encounter with Western culture and today, at a time when colonialism is in crisis, involved in a vast and complex process of emancipation. […] (De Martino, 1964, pp. 105–109, passim). (Cited in Massenzio and Alessandri (2013, p. 19, numbered paras) Thus, to the end of bourgeoise society of the modern era as the founding reference, De Martino (1964) adds, second, apocalypse in the Judeo-Christian

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tradition; third, apocalypse of the great religions; and fourth, ‘the current prophetic and millenarian religious movements of the so-called primitive cultures’. Finally, he adds ‘a fifth type of apocalyptic documentation acquires a decisive heuristic value, the psychopathological documentation that puts us face to face with a common human risk of radical crisis…’, following Heidegger, are ‘constituted as variously effective and productive attempts to lead to reintegration into a community project of being in the world’ (ibid.). This gives De Martino the following schema of what he calls types of ‘apocalypse documentation’: 1 2 3 4 5

Apocalypse as the end of bourgeoise society (in the Marxist tradition); Apocalypse in the Judeo-Christian tradition; Apocalypse in the world great religions; Millenarian religious movements of ‘so-called primitive cultures’; Psychopathological apocalypse of the ‘common human risk of radical crisis’.

It is clear that De Martino provides a new problematic motivated in part by his reading of Marx and a conjunction with the deleterious apocalyptic effects of Western colonial domination on indigenous cultures that provides a perspective that places traditional readings of apocalypse in the Judeo-Christian tradition in a different light, though I am unclear (because of my lack of Italian language) to what extent he draws the causal connection between the two: what are the connection between apocalyptic Judeo-Christian cultures (the West) and the apocalypse of indigenous cultures brought about by Western colonial powers? It is also clear that the apocalyptic reading of Marx might be supplemented alternative readings, particularly that of a Nietzschean interpretation. The ‘end of bourgeoise society’ which is normally taken as a prelude to the establishment of communism. In this regard it might be inquired whether the dialectical nature of history expressed in the form of class struggle has actually led to the disestablishment of capitalism or to a different kind of relationship. Nietzsche as apocalyptic thinker: Nietzsche, Marx, Deleuze The word ‘documentation’ might be better suited today to terms of ‘narrative’ or ‘discourse’ in that such terms provide a basis for the systematic interpretation of documents. The second, third and fourth aspects of the schema, provide and imply a historical framework of religions using the Judeo-­ Christian tradition as the paradigm for comparison with other world religions and with millenarian movements, wrongly termed ‘primitive cultures’ rather than ancient civilizations. There are some difficulties with this strategy that reflects the difficulty of a kind of ethnocentrism. The fifth seems outside the comparative history of religions to embrace the ‘history of being’. The first

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that accepts a Marxist framework requires the adoption of a philosophical view of history that is both Hegelian and dialectical but should not be taken as precluding other philosophies such as that one might ascribe to Nietzsche or Heidegger or indeed to the existential humanists (Sartre, Camus). De Martino was writing well before the French reappropriation of Nietzsche after the Nazi philosophers’ interpretations who now inspire a N ­ ietzschean Alt-right. Deleuze’s Nietzsche conferences in the 1960s and 1970s, and his work Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) led the reassessment of Hegel against Kojeve’s influential interpretation and the emergence of poststructuralist thought based on what Shrift (1995) calls ‘Nietzsche’s French Legacy’. The conferences at Royaumont in 1964, and Cerisy-la-Salle in 1972 included a group of preeminent thinkers such as Jean Wah, Gabriel Marcel together with a younger group of scholars that included Foucault, Vatimmo, Kossowski, Lyotard, Derrida, and Deleuze himself.1 Deleuze (1962/1983) pits ­Nietzsche against Hegel. ‘The labor of the dialectic’ requires a double negation to achieve affirmation whereas Deleuze’s Nietzschean ‘theory of the higher man’ questions the essential reactive formation given to mankind’s existence to emphasise the double affirmation. Ressentiment and bad conscience are the reactive forces that constitute human beings as reactive slaves. Deleuze identifies nihilism as the triumph of reactive forces in history counterposing becoming as the transmutation of historical force as will to power, action and affirmation. This interpretation, together with texts that Foucault, Derrida, Koffman, and others provide raise the question of a non-dialectical Marx, a Nietzschean Marx as Kline (1969, p. 166) expresses it: ‘Nietzsche, like Marx, is a decisively post-Hegelian thinker. Both thinkers place primary emphasis upon human history, although both—in clear opposition to Hegel—stress future, not past history’. One might also mention the theoretical anti-humanism that took place following Russian formalism and its formulation first as structuralism led by Levi-Strauss, Lacan and Althusser and then as poststructuralism in Foucault’s Archeaology of Knowledge and The Order of Things. An account of Nietzschean Marx where the end of bourgeoise order no longer played the same role as in the early Marx (Peters, 2001) may permit a different reading of De Martino’s first crisis. Alternatively, we might talk of the rise of China as a post-bourgeoise socialist society against the decline of America as a house divided against itself, a repetition of the apocalypse genre of civilizational rise and fall beginning before Gibbon’s classical work, and continued differently with Spengler’s The Decline of the West, and the huge historical literature that analyses civilizational collapse. This literature of civilizational collapse that has ancient origins though quite separate from mythology must surely be admitted to de Martino’s schema? It is the eschatological that has shaped historical thinking in terms of ‘the end’ and also ‘the post’ as

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apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic rhetorical devices that posed the eschatological themes of western culture: the death of God, the end of metaphysics, the end of transcendental values, the end of modernism, of humanism, of Man, of history, of ideology, of the welfare state, of liberalism, of communism, of capitalism. Apocalyptic thinking I use the term ‘apocalyptical thinking’ as a means of describing this deep current of contemporary western philosophy that is anchored in ancient eschatologies. I first used this description in a paper I gave in Beijing and Wuhan in 2000 published as ‘Apocalyptic Thinking Now: The Ends of Postmodernism’ (Peters, 2008) and The Last Book of Postmodernism (Peters, 2011). I described ‘post’ as christening a popular set of discourses that proclaim in apocalyptic tones ‘the end’ that resonates with Hegelian discourses, of both the right and the left, that still carry some theoretical weight: the end of ideology, the end of the welfare state, the end of capitalism etc. As I noted ‘these eschatological narratives of endings and beginnings are endemic to western culture and help define both its cultural specificity and its sources of renewal.’ They have defined post-historical thinking in much of the contemporary landscape in aesthetics, philosophy, sociology and develop politics, as is described in summary in the following Figure 9.1. The figure requires a brief explanation as it represents a shift away from central western dominant epistemic categories centred on ‘modernity’ since the beginning of the twentieth century toward theories and concepts that are ‘post-western’. The categories themselves are less important than the swathe of terms that have been invented mostly to escape a western epistemological dominance and a world less dominated by the west. The names that follow each term are characteristic only, an exemplar, rather than the scholar who invented the term. Figure 9.1 represents the west trying to come to terms with its own decline successively after its imperialistic and colonial eras. Derrida’s ‘apocalyptic tone’ In ‘Of An Apocalyptic Tone recently adopted in Philosophy’ Derrida (1984) begins by translating the Greek apokalupsis, derived from the Hebrew verb gala, which as André Chouraqui shows ‘recurs more than one hundred times in the Hebrew Bible’ where the usages ‘disclosure, discovery, uncovering, unveiling, the veil being lifted from about the thing: … man’s or women’s sex, but also their eyes and ears’ (p. 4). Rather than attempting to interpret all the accords between gala and the apocalyptic – the Hebrew and the Greek – Derrida turns to the apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy and in doing so parodies and, as he says deforms the title of Kant’s Von einem neuerdings

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Figure 9.1  Western post-historical thinking-post (isms).

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erhobenen Vornnehmen Ton in der Philosophie (1796) [‘Of an Overlordly Tone recently adopted in Philosophy’]. Derrida maintains Kant both ‘de- nounces a manner of giving oneself air’ and ‘attacks a tone that announces something like the death of philosophy’ (p. 6). Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s text, of the mystagogues or the overlordly tone adopted, is followed by the statements ‘There had been and will always be philosophical mystification, speculation on the end and the ends of philosophy’ (p. 8) and he mentions the way that Plato’s texts have served a model of such endings, especially the myth of Er in the Republic. For Kant as Derrida describes it, the mystagogic metaphysicians have emasculated [Fr. castrated] reason, where the contract of philosophers is to ‘declare their concern to speak the truth, to reveal without emasculating the logos’. Derrida holds that Kant denounces those who proclaim the end of philosophy, at the same time he signals the limit or the end of a certain kind of metaphysics, thus inaugurating ‘another wave of eschatological discourses in philosophy’ which have marked modern philosophy. In one sense Derrida is suggesting that just as it is impossible to escape metaphysics per se, it is impossible to escape the ending of philosophy, the ends of philosophy, and what the endings recall – new programs, new conceptions, new styles, new beginnings. Derrida typifies developments in eschatology since Hegel including the eschatologies of Marxism and Nietzscheanism. The well-known passage from Derrida that charts the seemingly inevitable logic of western philosophy that repeats the same tropes endlessly is worth quoting in its entirety: To be sure there are obvious differences between Hegelian eschatology, that Marxist eschatology people have too quickly wanted to forget these last years in France (and perhaps this was another eschatology of Marxism, its eschatology and its death knell [glas]), Nietzschean eschatology (between the last man, the higher man, and the overman), and so many other more recent varieties. But aren’t these differences measured as deviations in relation to the fundamental tonality of this Stimmung audible across so many thematic variations? Haven’t all the differences [différends] taken the form of a going-one-better in eschatological eloquence, each newcomer, more lucid than the other, more vigilant and more prodigal too, coming to add more to it: I tell you this truth; this is not only the end of this here but also and first of that there, the end of history, the end of class struggle, the end of philosophy, the death of God, the end of religions, the end of Christianity and morals (that [ça], that was the most serious naïveté), the end ofa the subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of earth, Apocalypse Now, I tell you, in the cataclysm, the fire, the blood, the fundamental earthquake, the napalm descending from the sky by helicopters, like prostitutes, and also the end of literature, the end of painting, art as a thing of the past, the end of psychoanalysis, the end of the university, the end of phallocentrism and phallogocentrism, and I don’t

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know what else? And whoever would come to refine, to say the finest fine [le fin du fin], namely the end of the end [la fin de la fin], the end of ends, that the end has always already begun, that we must still distinguish between closure and end, that perhaps would, whether wanting to or not, participate in the concert. For it is also the end of the metalanguage on the subject of eschatological language. With the result that we can wonder if eschatology is a tone, or even the voice itself. (Derrida, 1984, pp. 20–21) Heidegger’s characterises Nietzsche’s use of the term ‘nihilism’ as a means to refer to the forgetfulness of being. In his Nietzsche lectures given over the period 1936–1940, Heidegger transitions from defining will to power as art to defining will to power as knowledge. In Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being (1944–46), translated by David F. Krell as ‘The Eternal Recurrence of the Same’ in Nietzsche II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same (1984), Heidegger understands Nietzsche’s nihilism as a devaluation of the highest values through the principle of the will to power. Nietzsche’s apocalypse reaches its apostasis in ‘modernity’, a crisis that leads to the loss of meaning and the collapse of all prior truths and values. The move to psychopathology and being Massenzio and Alessandri (2013) explain De Martino lays a foundation stone for ‘a new anthropological horizon’ and humanistic ethic that may become aware of itself, its own ‘dogmatic ethnocentrism’, to initiate a philosophical discourse that inquires of itself ‘problematising its destiny’ (De Martino, 2002: 395–396) especially against the background of the confrontation of the non-Western Other in the modern history of colonialism and imperialism. World history as such might highlight a philosophically new humanism no longer build on European principles of the Reformation, Renaissance or ­Enlightenment but only on the condition that it actively confronts the ideologies of European humanism in ways similar to Heidegger in his ‘Letter On Humanism’ without necessarily adopting the Heideggerian question of the history of being. This would leave open then the possibility of an interpretation that embraces Nietzsche as a thinker of the apocalypse, perhaps the deepest in European philosophy, who in the terse sentence ‘God is dead’, calls an end to the endemic religious narrative and genre that so dominates the West and it’s attempt to think historically. Tobia Farnetti and Charles Stewart (Farnetti & Stewart, 2012) in their ‘Translators’ Preface to An Introduction to ‘Crisis of presence and religious reintegration’ by Ernesto de Martino’ indicate that an English audience will have translation difficulties with his Crocean philosophy of history, his complex relation to his master Croce or his inherited ‘presentism’ (‘All history is contemporary history’ according to Collingwood) – ‘human becoming

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according to the transcendental categories of aesthetics, logic, ethics, and economics’ (p. 432). Their interpretation of De Martino’s ‘crisis of presence’ is a kind of ‘dehistorification’ or loss of history and society, even ‘a removal from history’ or ‘falling out of history’. They write: Yet, de Martino thinks within a historicist paradigm, which assumes dynamism rather than homeostasis. Crises arise from the stagnation and fixation of that dynamic power that ordinarily propels the individual toward the future. Such moments arise unpredictably, symptoms of the human condition, which Heidegger described as ‘thrownness.’ The crisis of presence is a momentary failure of the Hegelian synthesis according to which the givens of the past and the present should become something novel in the future. Reintegration is not a return to a stable cultural norm, but an exercise in creative, even revolutionary, power akin to the invention of culture ­described by Wagner (1981). (Farnetti & Stewart, 2012, p. 432) Ernesto De Martino makes his thought possible and his notion of ‘cultural Apocalypse’ is immensely important in so far as it picks up on Lanternari’s cultural ethology and the systematic extermination of indigenous peoples. It is also important as a perspective on emerging world history. Aldrovandi (2014, p. 195) describes Ernesto De Martino’s heuristic category of ‘cultural Apocalypse’ as a long-standing archetype whose symbolic import exceeds the religious landscape, to flood across many other cultural domains such as politics, philosophy, literature and the arts. For De Martino, the archetype’s primary meaning would not hint at the violent annihilation of the mundane sphere along with all the forms of life contained in it but, rather, at the diffused and unsettling perception of the impending end of a given cultural order. In De Martino’s words, experiencing an apocalypse implies first of all a ‘loss of presence’, that is, being cast outside any possible secular or religious horizon of salvation, completely detached from the familiar, facing without any comfort the diabolical unhinging of all that has been known. Aldrovandi suggests that September 11 as the most spectacular case of terrorism can be fruitfully viewed in terms of De Martin’s lens of ‘cultural Apocalypse’, representing ‘a traumatic breakdown’ and an ‘acute disorientation and anxiety’ with the collapse of a traditional societal symbolic framework that ‘marks the end of the world’ but also includes regenerative possibilities. Where the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 represented the end of the Soviet empire it also simultaneously inaugurated the beginning of the ‘American Century’, itself a metanarrative shattered by ‘September 11’, 2001, a mere decade later. Part of this disrupted narrative is the end of the war in Afghanistan when

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the US pulled its troops out of Afghanistan after twenty years that frames a discourse about a larger discourse of the shift from a sole superpower to a multipolar world order. the decline of the West and the rise of China as the contemporary philosophical backdrop – against which Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine might also be considered a part. The ‘no limits partnership’ signalled by China and Russia with standoffs on Ukraine and Taiwan and commitment to collaborate more against the West is described as being superior to any Cold War alliance. China joined Russia in calling for an end to NATO’s enlargement and supported its demand for security guarantees from the West, notably regarding Ukraine. ‘The Joint Statement Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development’ (February 4, 2022)2 indicates that humanity is entering ‘a new era of rapid development and profound transformation’ that ‘sees the development of such processes and phenomena as multipolarity, economic globalization, the advent of information society, cultural diversity, transformation of the global governance architecture and world order’ with correspondingly ‘increasing interrelation and interdependence between the States; a trend has emerged towards redistribution of power in the world’ and ‘a growing demand for the leadership aiming at peaceful and gradual development’ - bitterly ironic given the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Linking with De Martino, we have to recognise an ‘apocalyptic documentation’ that falls under the description of ‘Politics’ in Figure 9.1 and specifically to ‘postcolonialism’ for which I have chosen the figure of Edward Said, a founder of the modern field of postcolonial studies. The other items in this list are about inner transformations of European modernity, its colonial conquests and its structural oppressions. In essence, a colonial encounter that involved a recognition of the other, and also the complete cultural ‘extinquishment’ that in an extreme form was based on genocidal policies – a cultural apocalypse that meant the end of a civilization. Reclaimed Cultural Apocalypse: A topic with ‘post’ implications Chengbing Wang, School of Philosophy, Shanxi University, Shanxi, China [email protected] In his paper Cultural Apocalypse, Western Colonial Domination and ‘the End of the World’ Peters discusses the theme and motif of ‘apocalypse’ as well as apocalypse culture in the contemporary academic and cultural context. As he points out, the theme of apocalypse has a long history and various manifestations in western philosophy and culture. Peters provides an overview of the thought of apocalyptic thinkers such as Ernesto De Martino, Nietzsche, Marx, and Deleuze, and summarizes and constructs a post-historical western

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apocalyptic schema of thinking in aesthetics, philosophy, political economy, media, cultural studies, and politics. To my mind, as an interpretation of western philosophy and culture, it provides many ideas worth contemplating further about modernity and its impact on the human spiritual condition. According to Peters, it was during his lectures in China at the beginning of the 21st century that he tried to use the term ‘apocalyptical thinking’ to describe the deep current in contemporary western philosophy which can be traced back to ancient western eschatology. His lectures during his visit to Beijing, in which I participated, were directly related to the enthusiastic reception of the topic of endings among Chinese scholars at the end of the 20th century. At that time there was a great deal of serious thinking about endings, and a number of translations and works appeared discussing the ‘end’ in politics, philosophy, art, science, management, history, and so on. I myself translated The End of Education: Toward Post Humanism (Spanos, W. V. 1993, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press) and had it published during that period. However, frankly speaking, I did not have much understanding of apocalyptic thinking then due to my own academic attainment, my philosophical vision and understanding, and the state of Chinese society as a whole at that time. I remember that I did encounter the topic of apocalypse when I undertook the translation of Spirituality and Society in the late 1990s. The author explicitly wrote in the text that ‘Apocalypse means, however, not “annihilation” but “unveiling”’ (Griffin, 1988, p. 64). I myself also repeatedly pondered the meaning of this term, and even added a footnote below the Chinese translation of this part of his work to highlight the richness and complexity of this term: ‘The word “apocalypse” has multiple meanings. One is “apocalypticism” and “apocalyptic,” especially religious revelation that foretells the terror of great turmoil or the end of the world; another refers to “finality” and “end.” Therefore, I translated it as “disaster”’ (Griffin, 1988, 1998, p. 102). Nevertheless, in retrospect, I find I did not accurately grasp and express the deep philosophical implication of this term by simply translating it as ‘disaster’. It is a delight that, after twenty years, Peters has reclaimed ‘apocalypse’ and constructed a framework for understanding ‘cultural apocalypse’. For many Chinese scholars, it is just the time for another round of discussion of this theme. On the one hand, the reform and opening up of China over the past forty years has brought about radical changes in Chinese society, and propelled China into the modernity world. Having been exposed to the impact and tremendous power of modernity, we are more sympathetic to the concerns and worries of postmodern thinkers. On the other hand, many of the problems and challenges associated with modernity, such as ecological, energy, and environmental problems; the widening gap between rich and poor; epidemic diseases; wars and serious conflicts, have not been reduced and overcome but have rather become more and more serious. Therefore, Peters’ restatement of the ‘cultural apocalypse’ is a new attempt to understand modern society and the spiritual condition of people today. At the same time, I also believe that

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how to fill out an existing theoretical framework and transform a religious implication into a philosophical reflection is a major academic challenge that awaits the participation of more scholars, including Chinese scholars. As an aside, when pondering over the topic explored by Peters, I maintain that more analysis and argumentation is still needed: there is no lack of ‘cultural apocalypse’ or comparable propositions in ancient Chinese philosophy and culture. When the topic of ‘apocalypse’ is discussed, the usual academic treasures should be explored thoroughly. The evergreen theorization of ‘change’ in Chinese philosophy and culture; the theory of historical cycles supported by the ‘Five-element Theory’, which illustrates the mutual promotion and restraint among the five elements of metal, wood, water, fire and earth; and the serious and powerful sense of concern for other people and society writ large in Chinese civilization are all worthy of consideration here, and provide a means by which Chinese scholars can make more contributions to the discussion of this topic. Fearing the end that isn’t ours Carl Mika, University of Canterbury, New Zealand [email protected] Nothing excites me more than a good apocalyptic story. Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’ is the exemplar for me, and so it has become the Gideon Bible for guests in our house. It details the eventual extinction of humanity but, most interesting for me, those remaining had to rely on religious leaders and signs to navigate their way. Rationality was finally (thankfully, even) being questioned as the privileged mode of organizing affairs. To me, the demise of rationality was indeed something to be thankful for because it signaled a humility, in that humanity can no longer organize things in the world in accordance with its own wishes. This strange overlap between reason and superstition exists for the Indigenous philosopher to the extent that, if Heidegger (1956) was correct, we Indigenous folk did not have philosophy as such to begin with. We have at our disposal something else altogether. Having declared myself to be fine with Maori never having had philosophy and that, therefore, philosophy was never truly here for us, and it will never die on us because we never had it, I now find myself - a non-possessor of reason - watching somewhat voyeuristically as Western philosophy (or simply ‘philosophy’, to avoid the tautology that Heidegger speaks of) deals with any possible threat to reason and therefore itself. It is with that single thought in mind that I express gratitude to Peters for bringing to my attention this overall theme, and particularly the somewhat obscure piece of writing by Kant, complete with Derrida’s reaction. In the act of lampooning - and, tellingly, while he is attempting to preserve reason - Kant

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seems to do a fairly good job of emasculating reason through his own change in tone. But more significantly, one gets the feeling that there is a desperation at work, a tonal change of Kant’s own as he frantically tries to fight off even the vaguest hint of a death in reason. His reaction is part of being human and cleaving tightly to whatever one has treasured and based their identity on, however great a philosopher they were. However, despite the touching dedication of a group to its object of affection, the possible demise of that thing must always be raised. Maori have questioned rationality for several decades, with much damage having been inflicted on Maori and other Indigenous peoples in its name. The death of rationality signals a vastly different possibility that Peters, too, is hinting at when he notes that ‘a philosophically new humanism no longer built on European principles of the Reformation, Renaissance or Enlightenment but only on the condition that it actively confronts the ideologies of European humanism [might be highlighted]’. Recently, a good friend and colleague from University of British Columbia, Prof. Vanessa Andreotti, wrote a book titled Hospicing Modernity. Andreotti is Indigenous Brazilian (although her identity is discussed with more complexity in the book). As an Indigenous scholar myself, I found her overall argument that we need to let go of the shiny baubles that modernity constantly puts on offer for us compelling. For Andreotti (as for Peters), the apocalypse might be moderate or it might not, but whatever form it takes, it is never going to be easy to let go of rationality especially. Although we may not possess ‘philosophy’, Indigenous peoples do adhere to and benefit from rationality in other spheres of our lives, and for Andreotti we had better be prepared to relinquish it. But that cession will not be anywhere near as painful as it will be for the Kants of this world. We can expect the apoplectic to attend the apocalyptic - ‘apocaplexy’ might be a suitable portmanteau here - especially in connection with the death of reason. And in that very moment of apocaplexy, rationality’s disciples will have set the ball rolling simply with their extravagantly emotional attempts to stop that happening. The reversible reckoning: The European style of post-apocalyptic thinking Steve Fuller, University of Warwick, United Kingdom [email protected] The strand of postcolonial studies that intellectually sustains today’s social justice movements styles itself as steadfastly opposed to what it regards as the ‘European’ sensibility, which is marked by a desire to expand its reach indefinitely, rather like what Oswald Spengler identified as the West’s ‘Faustian’ soul. However, there is another, equally profound yet probably unintended way in which postcolonial studies is alien to the European sensibility. Generally speaking, European history has been one of ‘reversible reckonings’. To see

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what I mean intuitively, consider a time-lapse map of the shifting boundaries of Europe over the past millennium (e.g. YouTube, 2017). I shall return to the map’s significance below, but for now note the contrast with the source of postcolonialism’s moral fervour: namely, a belief in righting the wrongs of history. It presumes that some final reckoning can be made of who did what to whom and when, which in turn determines the size and shape of the ‘reparations’ required to balance the books and clear the debt that the offender incurred. Postcolonial scholars and activists routinely draw inspiration from the ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ established in South Africa in the 1990s to draw a line under the nation’s historic racial Apartheid policy. The word ‘Truth’ in the Commission’s title suggests definitiveness, whereby all parties are forced to agree to a common reality that cannot be questioned or denied, let alone reversed. The success of such an arrangement depends on the original offence having occurred in the living memory of those who are brought together to bear witness to it, as well as the durability of the institutions that are then established to bind the descendants of the original parties. In the process, certain acts previously considered legal become illegal, and vice versa. The overall conclusion is that ‘never again’ will the offending policy (Apartheid) return. As Jon Elster (2004) has observed, that is a tall order rarely delivered to everyone’s satisfaction. Indeed, Europe’s most ambitious attempt at such ‘restorative justice’ resulted in the long-term disaster triggered by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. To be sure, it culminated much wishful thinking about the First World War as ‘the war to end all wars’ (H.G. Wells), whereby America’s brokering of the peace would ‘make the world safe for democracy’ (Woodrow Wilson). However, in fact, the Treaty delivered a sense of justice to the offending parties – G ­ ermany and its imperial allies – that was at once retributive, commutative and distributive. The onerous character of the payments reflected both the quality and quantity of their offence: They stood accused of having done enormous damage that should not have been done – and should never be done again. Moreover, the payments were divided proportionally among the perceived victims of this damage, who were now parcelled into nation-states that were somehow meant to correspond to ethnic homelands. Savvier thinkers at the time, notably John Maynard Keynes (1919), dubbed the peace ‘Carthaginian’, a peace to end all peace. In effect, had Hitler himself not existed, someone else would have filled the void in the years leading up to the Second World War. After all, Hitler’s rhetorical strategy amounted to no more than a Gestalt switch that positioned Germany as itself an ethno-national state victimized by those who imposed the Versailles settlement. Nearly a century later, the strategy was adapted by Donald Trump’s original spin doctor, Steve Bannon, to flip the status of White working-class males from the aggressors to the victims of social justice campaigns that had been raging in the US for the previous forty years. But instead of amplifying the Hitler-Trump

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analogy, I would simply draw attention to the centrality of the ‘reversible reckoning’ in their common strategy. To anyone with a view to the world as a whole, contemporary postcolonial scholarship appears very parochial. It is mainly about settling a particular score, largely with the British Empire and those who aided and emulated its practices. To be sure, this focus sweeps up much of the world – but not all of it. Moreover, it misses the spirit in which Edward Said (1978) founded postcolonial studies as a critique of ‘Orientalism’, which had less to do with the ‘Orient’ as such than with the Freudian mutual mirror-imaging of JudaeoChristendom and Islam throughout their fraught coexistence. Each saw its own failings in the other, from whom they then learned, often by stealth. This process required considerable shifting back and forth in perspective over a common reality, which was ultimately grounded in Abrahamic theology. Extended as a secular political practice, it enabled the distinctive European phenomenon of ‘reversible reckoning’, whereby alternative histories of the same place can exist in tandem, ready to be triggered at a moment’s notice to license a shift in territorial boundaries. Indeed, it was played out across the world in the heyday of colonial expansion; hence the often ironic discourses involving the ‘carving’ of land. In this respect, Putin’s war against Ukraine represents a meta-level flipping of perspectives, whereby the entire premise (aka ‘game’) on which the Treaty of Versailles was based is false – that is, the very idea that the world should be divided into ethno-national states rather than more ‘culturally’ defined empires (Fuller, 2022). Notes 1 Schrift footnotes the French collections that resulted as Nietzsche Cahiers de Royaumont (Editions de Minuet, 1967) and Nietzsche aujourd’hui (Union G ­ enerale D’editions, 1973). 2 http://en.kremlin.ru/supplement/5770

References Aldrovandi, C. (2014). Cultural apocalypse. In: Apocalyptic movements in contemporary politics. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 195–220. https://doi.org/10.1057/ 9781137316844_6 De Martino, E. (1964). apocalissi culturali e apocalissi psicopatologiche], Nuovi Argomenti, 69–71. 106–141; http://www.etesta.it/materiali/2018_2019_deM_1964_ Apocalissi%20culturali.pdf. De Martino, E. (2002). La fine del mondo: Contributo all’analisi delle apocalissi culturali, ed. Clara Gallini (Torino: Einaudi, 1977) [The end of the world. Contribution to the analysis of cultural apocalypses], Biblioteca Einaudi, http://www.einaudi.it/ libri/libro/ernesto-de-martino/la-fine-del-mondo/978880614356. Deleuze, G. (1962/1983). Nietzsche and philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson. Athlone Press, Columbia University Press.

116  Michael A. Peters, Chengbing Wang, Carl Mika, et al. Derrida, J. (1984). Of an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy. Oxford Literary Review, 6(2), 3–37. Elster, J. (2004). Closing the books: Transitional justice in historical perspective. ­Cambridge University Press. Farnetti, T., & Stewart, C. (2012). Translators’ preface to an introduction to “Crisis of presence and religious reintegration. by Ernesto de Martino. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2(2), 431–433. Fuller, S. (2022). Eurasianism as the deep history of Russia’s discontent. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 54(7), 863–866.’ https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2022. 2054330 Griffin, D. R. (Ed). (1988). Spirituality and society: Postmodern visions. State University of New York Press. Griffin, D. R. (Ed.) (1998). Spirituality and society: Postmodern visions. (Simplified ­Chinese version, Wang, C. Trans.). Central Compilation & Translation Press. (Original work published in 1988). Heidegger, M. (1956). What is philosophy? Rowman & Littlefield. Keynes, J. M. (1919). The economic consequences of the peace. Macmillan. Kline, G. L. (1969). Nietzschean marxism in Russia. In: Adelmann F.J. (eds) Demythologizing marxism. The Boston college studies in philosophy (vol 2, pp 166–183). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3185-1_5 Massenzio, M., & Alessandri, A. (2013). The apocalypse issue in Italian anthropology: From vittorio lanternari to ernesto de martino. Archives De Sciences Sociales Des ­Religions, 161(161), 127–145. https://doi.org/10.4000/assr.24871 Peters, M. A. (2001). Poststructuralism, marxism, and neoliberalism: Between theory and politics. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Peters, M. A. (2008). Apocalyptic thinking now: The ends of postmodernism. Review of Contemporary Philosophy, 7, 54–68. Peters, M. A. (2011). The last book of postmodernism. Peter Lang. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Random House. Shrift, A. (1995). Nietzsche’s French legacy: A genealogy of poststructuralism. Routledge. YouTube. (2017). ‘watch how a 1000 years of European borders change. Time lapse map’ watch how 1000 years of European borders change. Time Lapse Map - YouTube (Posted 26 October).

Chapter 10

The coming pandemic era Michael A. Peters

There is evidence and informed expert opinion that we are entering a coming age of pandemics where humanity is exposed to lethal and highly infectious bacterial or viral diseases that have the potential to decimate human populations. Already the science media are warning of ‘the next pandemic’ with a focus on secure food systems, disease hotspots, human/wildlife intersections, and crops diseases.1 ‘A World at Risk’ report (GPMB, 2019), of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, made the following warning in September 2019: …there is a very real threat of a rapidly moving, highly lethal pandemic of a respiratory pathogen killing 50 to 80 million people and wiping out nearly 5% of the world’s economy. A global pandemic on that scale would be catastrophic, creating widespread havoc, instability and insecurity. The world is not prepared. (Foreword, p. 6). The document argues for seven urgent actions to prepare the world for global health emergencies including investment in health infrastructures and ‘strong systems’ and leadership by regional and multilateral institutions with appropriate financial risk planning and development assistance. The nature of the prophetic announcement and analysis in retrospect demonstrates two related principles: first, how badly prepared the world has been and how it has failed in general to be able to institute a ‘whole of society approach’ at national and global levels; second, how interconnected the world now is and how preparedness and treatment critically depends upon recognizing the whole-of-earth approach which speaks to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and in particular aims of universal education and elimination of poverty. One aspect that escapes the report that stands out in the middle of the Covid-19 health emergency is the politicization of the virus not only in terms of blame and responsibility but also in terms of libertarian politics that

DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895-11

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attempts to minimise the risks involved but talking up individual rights and fear of the state. This politicization has become more pronounced as the costs and the mismanagement of the Covid-19 threat has grown, especially in world states where national populism and contemporary forms of neofascism are potent political movements. It is the case that these movements are also associated with blaming tactics and conspiracy theories to deflect responsibility of administrations that have not well coordinated social distancing, basic hygiene, mask-wearing and other social isolation strategies in the name of collective welfare. That the current US administration under Donald Trump as should shy away from its welfare responsibilities at home and abroad indicates the international dangers of diseases spreading rapidly and compromises any global coordination responses. The real question is how to design a world health system of preparedness when rogue nation administrations do not want to join multilateral or world organisations tasked with protecting all peoples. The problem is highlighted in the often difficult relationship between science and science advice on the one hand and politics and policy, on the other. It is a question that has become now central to most of the related pressing global issues: the growing world arms race; world ecological disasters; world health emergencies and world economic development. Laurie Garret (2019), author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging ­Diseases in a World Out of Balance (1994), reports In May 1989, Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg gathered fellow Nobelists and a roster of extraordinary virushunters for a three-day meeting in Washington to consider a then bold hypothesis that viruses, far from being vanquished by modern medicine, were actually surging worldwide in animals and people, often in forms never previously seen. And air travel increasingly meant that an outbreak in an obscure location could spread to large cities, even make its way around the world. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/20/ theworld-knows-an-apocalyptic-pandemic-is-coming/ Peter Daszak (2020) suggests that we are entering a new pandemic era where an innocent activity like eating wildlife in one locality can, with global travel and encroaching development, lead to a pandemic. He indicates that the world’s disease hotspots on the edges of tropical forests provide the habitat for the diversity of wildlife that harbour an estimated 1.7 million viruses that become easily spread to humans. The ‘great acceleration’ of the Anthropocene has ‘dramatically altered our planet’s landscapes, oceans and atmosphere, transforming as much as half of the world’s tropical forest into agriculture and human settlements’. In a recent paper ‘Emerging Pandemic Diseases: How We Got to COVID-19’ (August, 2020) published in the journal Cell, Anthony Fauci, working with

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his colleague, epidemiologist David Morens, both from National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID),2 also suggest that humanity has entered the pandemic age. They argue In addition to … established infections, new infectious diseases periodically emerge. In extreme cases they may cause pandemics such as COVID-19; in other cases, dead-end infections or smaller epidemics result…Disease emergence reflects dynamic balances and imbalances, within complex globally distributed ecosystems comprising humans, animals, pathogens, and the environment. Understanding these variables is a necessary step in controlling future devastating disease emergences. https://www.cell.com/cell/ fulltext/S0092-8674(20)31012-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinking hub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867420310126%3Fshowall %3Dtrue Fauci’s NIAID profile indicates he was appointed Director of NIAID in 1984 with the basic research goal ‘to prevent, diagnose, and treat established infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, respiratory infections, diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis and malaria as well as emerging diseases such as Ebola and Zika’. He advised six Presidents on HIV/AIDS. NIAID has an estimated $5.9 billion budget for 2020.3 His encounters as one of President Trump’s chief scientific advisors has provided a case study of the thin line between science and politics in the Covid-19 crisis that has regularly generated conflicts and conspiracies. Fauci has publicly disagreed with Trump on many issues. Trump has contradicted the best scientific advice and made claims not supported by the latest science. Now as the number of deaths in the US explodes above 215,000 with little sign of improvement, scientists globally have signalled the mismanagement of the viral crisis by the Trump government. Various scientific organisations have indicated that by January the US might be facing a death toll of over 410,000.4 One of the burning questions facing us during the Covid-19 pandemic is the science/politics interface. Many false conspiracy theories have been generated often deliberately to deflect responsibility, manipulate populations, and spread misinformation for political purposes. Science has a role to play not only through informing best policy advice, through modelling and evidence-based research but also in terms of scientific communication and public education. Now that Trump has contracted Covid-19 it seems little has changed in his behaviour as he has recently openly flouted social distancing and mask-wearing. Significantly, Morens and Fauci (2020) in their August paper look to the longer term and the future for global humanity, indicating: ‘Newly emerging (and re-emerging) infectious diseases have been threatening humans since the neolithic revolution, 12,000 years ago, when human hunter-gatherers settled into villages to domesticate animals and cultivate crops’. The historical

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long-run of 12,000 years is relatively short when compared to the evolution of viruses and the beginning of life on the planet. There is some theoretical disagreement about whether cells or viruses came first.5 The fact is that viruses have been around and co-evolved with cells over 3.5 billion years ago.6 ­Recently, with huge overcrowding and a projected world population of 10 billion people the environmental mix has radically changed with rapid and ongoing deforestation, the spread of urban slums and the growth of wet markets for wild game. Now environmental degradation has become one of the key determinants of disease emergence with outbreak hot spots where people, domestic animals, and wild animals are crowded together. Morens and Fauci (2020) claim ‘Evidence suggests that SARS, MERS, and COVID-19 are only the latest examples of a deadly barrage of coming coronavirus and other emergences’. They continue Since there are four endemic coronaviruses that circulate globally in humans, coronaviruses must have emerged and spread pandemically in the era prior to the recognition of viruses as human pathogens. The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus (SARS-CoV) emerged from an animal host, likely a civet cat, in 2002–2003, to cause a near-pandemic before disappearing in response to public health control measures. The related Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus (MERS-CoV) emerged into humans from dromedary camels in 2012, but has since been transmitted inefficiently among humans (Cui, Li, & Shi, 2019). COVID-19, recognized in late 2019, is but the latest example of an unexpected, novel, and devastating pandemic disease. One can conclude from this recent experience that we have entered a pandemic era. (Morens, Daszak, & Taubenberger, 2020; Morens et al., 2020) They provide a global map of newly emerging coronaviruses that can upset and disrupt ‘complex globally distributed ecosystems comprising humans, animals, pathogens, and the environment’. They argue that we must better appreciate the dynamic balances and imbalances in the global ecosystem understanding it as an evolving planetary system increasingly based on humanity’s ‘widespread manipulation of nature’.

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Citing Richard Dawkins (1976) they comment: ‘evolution occurs at the level of gene competition and we, phenotypic humans, are merely genetic “survival machines” in the competition between microbes and humans’. The implication is that we need to better understand the complex relationships between humans, animals and pathogens that determine the path of evolution, and the emergence of pandemic diseases brought on by rapid and irreversible destruction of delicate ecosystems comprising the environment. The narrative is structured around a ‘doomsday clock argument’ suggesting that soon the Earth will reach a totally unsustainable global population that at the present rates of growth will consume, make extinct and exhaust, first, all other animal and insect life, while also increasing the risk from eating wild animals, and, second, the plant world, with the possibility of leading to the total extinction of life on Earth. This is a process fundamentally caused by human beings and, at this stage if we act quickly, the argument goes, it is still possible to prevent catastrophic pandemics by inventing and cultivating new eco-practices that are in ‘creative harmony’ with nature. The imbalances in the global ecosystem result from climate warming will help cause large temperature change and massive fire destruction of native forest and

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bush environments, the loss and extinction of wild animal and insect populations, and also consequent flooding and sea erosion and low-lying coastal environments. In the short term it is necessary to prevent further deforestation and to outlaw wildlife trade in order to protect against future zoonosis outbreaks. Andrew Dobson and his colleagues argue For a century, two new viruses per year have spilled from their natural hosts into humans (1). The MERS, SARS, and 2009 H1N1 epidemics, and the HIV and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemics, testify to their damage. Zoonotic viruses infect people directly most often when they handle live primates, bats, and other wildlife (or their meat) or indirectly from farm animals such as chickens and pigs. The risks are higher than ever … as increasingly intimate associations between humans and wildlife disease reservoirs accelerate the potential for viruses to spread globally. (Dobson et al., 2020, p. 378) They suggest that the rate of emergence of novel viruses and the costs of its economic impacts are increasing exponentially. New research has highlighted the role domesticated animals – both pets and livestock – play in the spread of viruses among humans and wildlife. Konstans Wells, Morand, Wardeh, and Baylis (2019), who leads the Biodiversity and Health Ecology research group at Swansea University, is reported as saying: Bats are commonly recognised as host of viruses that may eventually spillover into humans with devastating health effects, but the role of other mammalian groups and especially domestic species for the spread of virus are much less clear. Many of the current and future viral threads are linked to viruses that circulate in different animal species, connecting humans and mammal species into a huge network of who shares viruses with whom. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191219122521.htm Wells et al. (2019) and colleagues have traced the associations between 1,785 virus species and 725 mammalian host species to find that there is ‘strong evidence that beside humans, domestic animals comprise the central links in networks of mammalian host-virus interactions, because they share viruses with many other species and provide the pathways for future virus spread.’7 It has long be known that bats are a reservoir for viruses that through ‘viral host switching’ become the basis for the spread of new viruses. The evidence is quite unequivocal; some examples follow. Calisher and his colleagues, for instance, write The remarkable mammals known as ‘bats’ and ‘flying foxes’ … may be the most abundant, diverse, and geographically dispersed vertebrates… Although a great deal is known about them, detailed information is needed

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to explain the astonishing variations of their anatomy, their lifestyles, their roles in ecosystems ecology, and their importance as reservoir hosts of viruses of proven or potential significance for human and veterinary health. (Calisher, Childs, Field, Holmes, & Schountz, 2006, p. 531) So-called ‘viral host switching’ and the increased rate of emergence of epizootic diseases is a major cause for alarm. Parrish et al. (2008, p. 466) conclude While it is still not possible to identify which among the thousands of viruses in wild or domestic animals will emerge in humans or exactly where and when the next emerging zoonotic viruses will originate, studies point to common pathways and suggest preventive strategies. With better information about the origins of new viruses, it may be possible to identify and control potentially emergent viruses in their natural reservoirs. Narveen Jandu (2020) argues ‘Human activity is responsible for animal viruses crossing over and causing pandemics’: Viruses that circulate in other animals can enter a human population when a variety of human activities allow for consistent and regular interaction with naturally occurring reservoirs. These events involve repeated and routine interaction of humans with these animal hosts. Some of these interactions take place through the following human activities: hunting, butchering and farming (husbandry), as well as the global trade of animals and domestication of exotic animals as pets. Population growth, global travel and climate change that cause the disruption of habitats further provide opportunities for cross-species transfer. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-humanresponsible-animal-viruses-pandemics.html The Ebola outbreaks in West Africa are a result of human interaction with fruit bats either delivered directly or through animals hosts such as horses and pigs. It is clear that exploitation of wildlife and its huge multi-billion dollar market worldwide is leading to the loss of tropical forests and other natural habitats, exposing wildlife directly to humans with greater risks of viral spillovers. The risk of virus spillover from animals to humans has increased through wildlife exploitation and domestication.8 Wild animals and plants are rapidly disappearing especially through climate warming and consequent rampant and uncontrollable wild fires (Peters, 2020). Now is the time to return to return to the story of the emergence of society to question the domestication narrative and its environmental practices that have been often devastating for the global ecosystem with the importation of micro-organisms and pathogens that accompanied colonialism and the expansion of modern agriculture under neoliberal capitalism, decimating native wildlife and indigenous peoples with introduced species and imported

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pathogens that destroyed delicate ecosystems in the ‘new world’. In historical terms it is timely to revisit the politics of the domestication narrative and its deleterious environmental effects from plantation agriculture to the modern use of chemicals. The emergence of new diseases brings into central question the mass extinction of species through factory-farming and the destruction of native ecosystems that become threats to global biodiversity and govern emerging industrial humananimal-plant interactions of the last hundred and fifty years, crowding out wild nature and redrawing the lines between human settlement and the global ecosystem.9 To understanding models of novel disease emergence, philosophically, we need return to the domestication narrative and it’s place in human history 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and to understand how human settlement, colonial expansion and modern agrocapitalist systems progressively have permanently disturbed the globally distributed ecosystems and accumulated genetic resources comprising humans, animals, plants, pathogens, and the environment. This complex cultural history needs to be re-examined in the light of viral evolution and the emergence of new diseases that signal that we are entering an era of pandemics. Notes 1 https://www.scidev.net/global/spotlight/the-next-pandemic.html?gclid=CjwKC AjwzvX7BRAeEiwAsXExoxVUCVZqEMbY0h_QCNe4E06Ih2JAJ3GYBswmhU JCkgUTPe5mchM4thoCh_4QAvD_BwE 2 https://www.niaid.nih.gov/ 3 See his biography at https://www.niaid.nih.gov/about/anthony-s-fauci-md-bio 4 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191219122521.htm#:~: text=New%20research%20has%20highlighted%20the,of%20RNA%20and% 20DNA%20viruses. 5 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191219122521.htm#:~: text=New%20research%20has%20highlighted%20the,of%20RNA%20and% 20DNA%20viruses 6 https://news.wisc.edu/oldest-fossils-found-show-life-began-before-3-5-billionyears-ago/ 7 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-idUSKBN25V2A7 8 https://www.newsweek.com/risk-virus-spillover-animals-humans-wildlife-­ exploitation-domestication-1496635 9 See https://as.vanderbilt.edu/philosophy/people/facultyfiles/oliver-animal_­ pedagogy.pdf

References Calisher, C., Childs, J., Field, H., Holmes, K., & Schountz, T. (2006). Bats: Important reservoir hosts of emerging viruses. Clinical Microbiology Reviews, 19(3), 531–545. https://doi.org/10.1128/CMR.00017-06 Cui, J., Li, F., & Shi, Z. L. (2019). Origin and evolution of pathogenic coronaviruses. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 17, 181–192. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579018-0118-9

The coming pandemic era  125 Daszak, P. (2020). We are entering an era of pandemics – it will end only when we protect the rainforest. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/ jul/28/pandemic-era-rainforest-deforestationexploitation-wildlife-disease Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press. Dobson, A., Pimm, S., Hannah, L., Les Kaufman, L., Ahumada, J., Ando, A. … LochTemzelides, B. T. (2020). Epidemic diseases. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, 72(3), 457–470. https://doi.org/10.1128/MMBR.00004-08 Garret, L. (2019). The world knows an apocalyptic pandemic is coming. Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/20/the-world-knows-an-apocalypticpandemic-is-coming/ GPMB. (2019). A world at risk. WHO. Jandu, N. (2020). Human activity is responsible for animal viruses crossing over and causing pandemics. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-human-responsible-animalviruses-pandemics.html Morens, D. M., Breman, J. G., Calisher, C. H., Doherty, P. C., Hahn, B. H., Keusch, G. T. … Taubenberger, J. K.. (2020a). Origin and evolution of pathogenic coronaviruses. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 17, 181–192. https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41579-018-0118-9 Morens, D. M., Daszak, P., & Taubenberger, J. K.. (2020b). Escaping Pandora’s box – Another novel coronavirus. The New England Journal of Medicine, 382, 1293–1295. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp2002106 Morens, D., & Fauci, A. (2020). Emerging pandemic diseases: How we got to COVID-19. Cell, 1077–1092 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.08.021. Parrish, C., Holmes, E., Morens, D., Park, E.-C., Burke, D., Calisher, C. … Daszak, P. (2008). Crossspecies virus transmission and the emergence of new. Peters, M. (2020). Ecologies of fire. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/00131857.2020.1723464 Wells, K., Morand, S., Wardeh, M., & Baylis, M. (2019). Distinct spread of DNA and RNA viruses among mammals amid prominent role of domestic species. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 2019, 470–481 https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.13045

Chapter 11

The Armageddon Club Education for the future of humanity Michael A. Peters

Armageddon, while mentioned only once in the Greek New Testament (Revelation 16.16) uses the word from the Hebrew Harmagedon (Hill of Megiddo), meaning the hill or mountain, where armies gathered for the final battle during the end times. In contemporary usage the word has come to represent any ‘end of the world’ narrative, Christian or otherwise. In Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-day Adventists, (with some differences) Armageddon refers to the time when final judgement is made and the last great battle ensues to banish the unbelievers and set up the Kingdom of God. Today it has lost its exclusive religious meanings to come to represent any major global disaster like a nuclear war or extreme climate change that might threaten the survival of the human species. In Abrahamic religions, the ‘end times’ is a consequence of a linear cosmology where world events reach a final cataclysmic event generally associated with a form of redemption and resurrection of the righteous. (By comparison, non-Abrahamic religions often have a cyclical concept of time and theology). DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895-12

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In secular and scientific narratives, ‘end times’ has centered on a discourse about the fate of an ever-accelerating expanding universe cooling as it expands so that eventually it becomes too cold to sustain life. This hypothesis is tied to the notion of ‘dark energy’ associated with proton decay and the development of black holes that predict a kind of final heat-death of the universe. There are various estimates for the end of humanity and technological civilization, the end of the solar system and the universe. The formation and evolution of the solar system began some 4.6 billion years ago, and it is estimated that in roughly 5 billion years the Sun will begin to cool. The estimates are very long term and open to argument: there are estimates that predict the state of the solar system 10,000 years from now (including longterm effects of global warming and the melting of ice sheets) through to billions, trillions and numbers that are so vast it is difficult to write them down except as factors of 10 to the power of very large numbers. Estimates of the future of humanity are much easier to contemplate: 10,000 years from now is a number that has been mentioned as the life for technological civilization in the famous Doomsday argument used to predict the number of future human beings. J. Richard Gott (1993) predicted the human race would last for between 5100 and 7.8 million years and there have been other estimates using the same probabilistic argumentation. There have also been estimates of the shortest possible time that human beings could colonize the Milky Way – 1 million years from now. Michio Kaku (2018) has presented a vision of how we might, using current digital technologies, terraform and build cities on Mars and journey into the Solar System. Other cosmologists cannot envisage mass emigration from the Earth as a future prospect. The question of the future of humanity once the preserve of theology and world religions, has become a scientific, science fiction and philosophical issue. Nick Bostrom (2009) argues it is ‘practically important to try to develop a realistic mode of futuristic thought about big picture questions for humanity’ because some of our activities have global impact: The scale of human social organization has also grown, creating new opportunities for coordination and action, and there are many institutions and individuals who either do consider, or claim to consider, or ought to consider, possible long-term global impacts of their actions. Climate change, national and international security, economic development, nuclear waste disposal, biodiversity, natural resource conservation, population policy, and scientific and technological research funding are examples of policy areas that involve long time-horizons. Arguments in these areas often rely on implicit assumptions about the future of humanity. By making these assumptions explicit, and subjecting them to critical analysis, it might be possible to address some of the big challenges for humanity in a more wellconsidered and thoughtful manner. https://nickbostrom.com/papers/future.html

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Bostrom (2009) outlines four scenarios for the future of humanity: Extinction; Recurrent collapse; Plateau; and Posthumanity. He considers the current century a critical phase to humanity’s escaping the probability of extinction. Bostrom is the founder of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University (https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/) that ‘explores what we can do now to ensure a long flourishing future’ with a focus on AI and biotechnology. Anthropogenic extinction is seen as a strong probability during this century based on the threat of nuclear annihilation, biological warfare, pandemic, overpopulation, ecological collapse, climate change, AI technology (‘superintelligence’) and geological or cosmological disaster. Many contemporary scientists, including microbiologist Frank Fenner, Stephen Hawking, and climate change scientists who, for example, warn that humans are unlikely to survive the existential climate-related security risk thirty years into the future.1 Ray Kurzweil, Google’s chief engineer, suggests that life as we know it will cease by 2045.2 Increasingly, the future of humanity has attracted a variety of scholars who more pessimistically have emphasized biological extinction. Ceballos, E ­ hrlich, and Dirzo (2017), for instance, try to correct the common view that the Earth’s biota is slowly entering a period of biodiversity loss that has no immediate impact of the survival of the human species: This view overlooks the current trends of population declines and extinctions. Using a sample of 27,600 terrestrial vertebrate species, and a more detailed analysis of 177 mammal species, we show the extremely high degree of population decay in vertebrates, even in common “species of low concern.” Dwindling population sizes and range shrinkages amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilization. This “biological annihilation” underlines the seriousness for humanity of Earth’s ongoing sixth mass extinction event. They (Ceballos et al., 2017) argue ‘The loss of biological diversity is one of the most severe human-caused global environmental problems. Hundreds of species and myriad populations are being driven to extinction every year. From the perspective of geological time, Earth’s richest biota ever is already well into a sixth mass extinction episode’. These losses, they argue, are irreversible. The authors examine the number of decreasing vertebrate species suggesting that ‘as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone’. They also mention ‘the rapid defaunation of the globe and comparable losses in the diversity of plants’ due to ‘habitat conversion, climate disruption, overexploitation, toxification, species invasions, disease, and (potentially) large-scale nuclear war’. The ultimate drivers of biotic destruction are: human overpopulation and continued population growth, and overconsumption, especially by the rich. These drivers, all of which trace to the fiction that perpetual growth can occur on a finite planet, are themselves increasing rapidly.

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Thus, we emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short, probably two or three decades at most. All signs point to ever more powerful assaults on biodiversity in the next two decades, painting a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life. There are some that have been accused of alarmism. Guy McPherson is Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. He has visited NZ a couple of times in the last few years.3 On his 2016 visit he maintained the human species had 10 years left. In 2019, he reiterate his claim, suggesting we have only seven years left. Dana Nuccitelli (2018), an environmental scientist writing for The Guardian, classifies McPherson as a ‘climate alarmist’ and ‘climate misinformer’4 to distinguish them from ‘climate deniers’, who are much more influential. Nuccitelli (2018) writes: McPherson’s case basically boils down to arguing that feedbacks like large methane releases will soon kick in, causing a rapid spike in global warming that will lead to global extinctions. One of his primary pieces of supporting evidence is that Earth System Sensitivity – which describes how sensitive the climate is to the increased greenhouse effect over millennia – is higher than the shorter-term climate sensitivity. That was essentially the gist of a recent study profiled here in the Guardian. Over millennia, global temperatures and sea level rise will continue to rise beyond what climate models predict will happen over the next couple of centuries. But these are slow feedbacks, and as such won’t kick in within the next few decades. Scott Johnson did a very deep dive into McPherson’s flawed arguments, for those who want to learn about them in greater detail. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus97-per-cent/2018/jul/09/there-are-genuine-climate-alarmistsbut-theyre-not-in-the-same-league-as-deniers Climate change is only one of a possible ‘end times’ scenario and there are many others (noted above) and a great complexity of interrelationships ­between them. There are a number of important educational questions:

• Should schools teach children about ‘the future of humanity’ and ‘end times’, and, if so, what kind of approach should they follow?

• In the face of a new complexity that makes it very difficult to separate politics and policy from science, how should teachers proceed?

• What is the relation between school science and philosophy, and philosophy and climate change science, and how should it influence pedagogy?

• Should schools encourage climate activism of students? What is the link, if any, between activism and learning?

I put these questions to a number of scholars and asked them to respond in 500 words.

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Notes 1 http://www.climatecodered.org/2019/05/can-we-think-in-new-ways-about. html 2 https://www.unilad.co.uk/technology/the-end-of-humanity-is-coming-in2045-and-google-is-preparing-for-it/ 3 See his blog at https://guymcpherson.com/ 4 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-­per-cent/ 2018/jul/09/there-are-genuine-climate-alarmists-but-theyre-not-in-the-sameleague-as-deniers

References Bostrom, N. (2009). The future of humanity. Geopolitics, History, and International Relations, 1(2), 41–78. Retrieved from https://nickbostrom.com/papers/future. html Ceballos, G., Ehrlich, P. R., & Dirzo, R. (2017). Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of United States of America 114 (30), E6089–E6096. doi:10.1073/pnas.1704949114; Retrieved from https://www. pnas.org/content/114/30/E6089 Gott, R. J. III. (1993). Implications of the copernican principle for our future prospects. Nature, 363, 315. doi:10.1038/363315a0 Kaku, M. (2018). The future of humanity. New York: Doubleday. Nuccitelli, D. (2018). There are genuine climate alarmists, but they’re not in the same league as deniers. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jul/09/there-are-genuineclimatealarmists-but-theyre-not-in-the-same-league-as-deniers

Chapter 12

Educational philosophy and post-apocalyptic survival Michael A. Peters

The world faces a triple apocalypse: the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the huge unnecessary loss of life and the disastrous prospect of a limited ‘tactical’ nuclear war; the Covid pandemic that has been responsible for the deaths of nearly 6.5 million people; the global ecological crisis with massive biodiversity loss, species extinction, and 1000-year exceptional floods and megafires. These are existential crises that global youth now face on a daily basis. In 2019 1.6 billion children, nearly 70% of all children were living in a conflict-­ affected country, 426 million were living in an actual conflict zone, and 71 million under 5-year-olds had spent their entire lives in conflict zones.1 The Covid-19 has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of children and youth with hundreds of millions affected by the economic, social and mental consequences of the pandemic. The global ecological crisis means that our students now live in a systematically downgraded world environment exposed to rising temperatures and sea levels, biodiversity extinction, and the severe depletion of natural resources like fresh water and air. If we were trying to measure the effects of this triple apocalypse we might grade our first global civilization in terms of its ‘humanity’ as a catastrophic failure of monumental proportions. The failure itself is a failure of humanity, of imagination and of action. It is also a failure of world governance. It is an extraordinary facet of collective irrationally that some 7.9 billion human beings – global humanity on planet Earth – can go on living normal lives facing such global systemic risks. Can we go on much longer waiting for the full effects of these existential risks, or pretending that they do not exist – a kind of collective delusion and irrationality that depends on weighing up individual risk and their chances for survival. These global risks, while systemic, are not evenly distributed. They affect women and children disproportionately, immigrants and refugees, those in the global South who face daily hunger, and many other minority groups even in ‘advanced’ western countries that experience systemic inequality. The triple apocalyptic risk only highlights the current constellation of risk events. There are many such risks that overlap one another, sometimes colliding with immediate or far-distance effects or consequences for the planet. DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895-13

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Systemic global catastrophic risks These risks and their associated discourses often coalesce and magnify one another, sometimes as a lens or perspective and sometimes as an obfuscation or conspiracy (Figure 12.1). This list does not mention (except for philosophy) the academic resources in the physical, life and social sciences or humanities that are useful in understanding and analysing systemic global risks, although the relatively new emphasis on systems theory, cybernetics, complexity and Types of risk Astronomical Events that constitute significant cosmic risks: Heat death of the universe; virtual black hole; asteroid impact; geomagnetic storm; solar flare, stellar collision, interplanetary events (with associated hazards of mega fires or tsunami). Biological Extinction: Holocene extinction; human extinction; mass species extinction; genetic erosion or pollution. Biodiversity loss; risks from biotechnologies, biological terrorism or war; deforestation; defaunation; pandemic; colony overpopulation; overfishing; rapacious resource use. Technological Cybertechnology risks – cyberwarfare, terrorism; nanotechnologies; AI takeover & autonomous weapons; chemical and bio-weapons; technological singularity & transhumanism; science misexperimentation. Socio-political & economic Doomsday arguments; anthropogenic hazard; economic collapse – Global Financial Crisis; massive socio-economic inequalities; mounting international debt; Malthusian catastrophe; overpopulation; conspiracy theories (new world order); nuclear holocaust; societal & civilizational collapse; collapsology; World War III. Religious & eschatological Zoroastrian (Saoshyant); Buddhism & Hindu (Three Ages, Kalki) & apocalypse of Abrahamic religions; Jewish Messiah (War of Gog & Magog); Book of Daniel; Book of Revelation; Christian Last Judgement; Historicism; AntiChrist; New Earth, New Jerusalem; Resurrection; World to come; rapture; negative theology. Cultural & literary The ‘end times’; Apocalypse; Apocalypticism; Armageddon; Messianism; Millennialism; philosophical apocalypse (Hegel, Nietzsche, Derrida); disaster movies; (post)apocalyptical and fiction and science fiction; zombie culture Figure 12.1 Systemic global catastrophic risks. Source. Author’s development of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk.

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ecosystem theory indicates a multidisciplinary curriculum required to tackle these problems in a systematic way. One major problem is the perennial difficult relationship between science and public policy and world action. The nature of global systemic risk is now well known for the generations that grew up during the Cold War era after Hiroshima, Nagasaki (though not Berlin), nuclear testing in the Pacific, the tragedies of Chernobyl and Fukushima, dominated by anti-war and peace education – anti-Vietnam protests – during the early decades of the Cold War. Most of us were informed through independent media calculated the risks of ‘mutually-assured destruction’ and existing under the shadow. The beginnings of a global consciousness took the forms of eco-awareness and New Age movement that aimed at aspects of planetary spiritual and political awareness. The mystical element associated with a shift in consciousness came through a radical convergence of humanistic and transpersonal psychology combined with Eastern religious philosophies, a Gaia hypothesis of the ancestral mother of all life, and a multi-level critique of industrial capitalism with its dependence on coal, oil and gas, its rapaciousness, its alienated labour, and its savage inequalities. There is a strong interpretation of a broadly Left spiritual politics firmly tied to peace, ‘development’ and equality in an age of state redress and apology, compensating for the ongoing genocides of colonial histories – anchored in an understanding of the equal moral worth of all individuals or souls in the name of God or the nation. The nature of global systemic risks has shifted in a hyperglobalised world of multilateral powers and institutions built on increasing trade and global value chains, where there is no longer a sole superpower, no one state or agency that is in charge. The world consists in a complex of interconnected global and planetary systems that are evolving, dynamic, interlocked and determining. The extent to which these systems influenced each other introduces a level of complexity and stability. The Earth’s physical, climate and biological systems are co-determining of global economic, social and political systems associated with an advanced globalisation, after the global Silk Road, European colonialism, British and American imperialism, western neoliberalism. While an understanding of the physical systems and biological systems have been aided through the theoretical development of systems and complexity theories, the economic, cultural and political systems seem less open to scientific analysis and prediction. On the one hand AI and machine learning technologies offer promising applications to agriculture and the environment; on the other they pose an existential risk to human freedom and control. As many critical theorists since Heidegger, Ellul, Illich, Marcuse and McLuhan have pointed out technology (and increasingly, digital technologies) pose many dangers threatening surveillance, forms of consciousness and participation in our own control. With the increasing interdependence of societies, social scientists have ­focused on new threats of systemic instability and fragility that come with globalization and the emergence of a global system comprised of sets of

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interactions among tightly coupled overlapping networks that affect increasing flows of trade, capital, information, services and people in a growing digital economy that depends upon interconnectivity (Centeno, Nag, Patterson, Shaver, & Windawi, 2015). Such an understanding demands an understanding of global risk in terms of systems theory, complexity and network analysis, together with new methodologies that define and map the source and nature of global risk, and strong interdisciplinary empirical case studies. Above all this calls for a systems-based curriculum and a study of the interactions and collisions of interlocking systems especially where physical and biological systems impact of life and social systems, as well as a better understanding of the collapse of systems, the differences between physical and social or civilizational collapse, and a more sophisticated understanding a host of ecosystem concepts – community, network, environment, emergence, tipping point, resilience, coevolution – that help to identify the growing interdependencies between technology, communication, and the symbolic economy and their disruptions, as well as the related growing political instabilities in a multipolar world.2 Forced migrations due to war or conflict war together with refugees fleeing war, famine or natural disasters is a consequence of globalisation that intensify geopolitical tensions in a world witnessing the decline of the west and the rise of Asia with an increasing number of people, nearly 80 million people, forcibly displaced in war-torn areas like Syrian, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and DR of Congo.3 This generation has grown up in an era of impending environmental catastrophe and ecosystem collapse, where the probability of disaster linked to the accumulation of greenhouse gases and an uneven geographical distribution of territorial damage posing difficulties for the social and economic analysis of large-scale risks and possible irreversible environmental damage (Besley & Dixit, 2017). Susan Park (2022) argues ‘We are at a critical juncture in human history’ referring to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment, adding ‘Not only are we changing the climate, but human activity is also changing the rate and type of environmental disasters’ (p. 1). ‘The 21st century will be more disaster prone. More extreme weather events are likely. Our consumption and production patterns are changing the earth systems’ She cites Wiedmann, Lenzen, Keyßer, and Steinberger (2020, p. 4) who suggests ‘The affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts and are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions.’ The transition to sustainability requires limits to consumption but faces ‘the structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies inhibits necessary societal change’. The fragility of financial markets and the world’s architecture for trade exchange and facilitation requires attention to the Global Financial Crisis and mounting difficulties of mass personal and country debt default. Apocalyptic narratives structure a western concept of history and historicity as strictly linear when tied to a conclusive end of human history and a rush

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toward catastrophe, predicted by astrophysics as a possible asteroid impact or the end of the sun a billion years hence. There is no universal history but there is a history of the planet and an acceptance that apocalyptic thinking may also signal a new age or possible rebirth – resilience, restoration, rehabilitation – of the planet. The post-apocalyptic survival requires a new awareness of community as ecosystem and of working together rather than savage and crass individualism based on ego-politics. The new philosophy is interconnectivity, relational and getting on with one’s neighbour, even if they hold opposing views. It points to the critical eco-regionalism that protects fresh water, the ­integrity of the food web, the fight against biodiversity loss, and the democratization of sustainability goals and practices that harnesses the marriage between modern ecological science, indigenous knowledge systems and eschatological narratives; although ‘saving the planet’ is also subject to ideological excesses. The problem is how to inspire hope and action without fear or anxiety. Part of the ecosphere is the West/East and North/South polarities of world systems and the continuation of Cold War politics that is leading to a new stage of proliferation of nuclear weapons and missile systems, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the standoff with NATO, the trade and tech wars between US and China and the militarization of the China South Sea and the wider Pacific. The US Indo-Pacific Command headquarter in Hawaii already consists of 200 ships, five aircraft carrier strike groups, nearly 1,100 aircraft, and approximately 375,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel4, now regrouping or ‘rebalancing’ it’s forces and expanding its bases in the ‘pivot’ of US foreign policy designed to counter China as a rising world power and its acquisition of Pacific bases. How the west responds to the rise of China and the Asian century (China, followed by India, ASEAN, Eurasia) will in large measure determine the new mentality—Cold War or world digital interconnectivity. The new AUKUS pact to equip Australia with twelve nuclear submarines might be considered a provocation especially if it becomes the basis for a demand to be a nuclear power; or it may be considered legitimate military modernization in response to uncertainty. Educational philosophies of post-apocalyptic survival requires a new consciousness that understands the complex interplay of physical, biological, economic and political systems and the new interdependencies. These philosophies must employ all kinds of intellectual resources based on concepts and theories drawn from many different disciplines to analysis and understand intersecting systems – their overlap and collision – that will shape the horizon within which human will determine its post-apocalyptic survival or its catastrophic extinction. Notes 1 Children Affected by Armed Conflict, 1990–2019, 2020, https://reliefweb.int/ report/world/children-affected-armed-conflict-1990-2019

136  Michael A. Peters 2 https://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2014/part-2-risks-in-focus/2-1-introduction-understanding-global-systemic-risk/?doing_wp_cron=1648344172.7560 360431671142578125 3 https://www.migrationdataportal.org/themes/forced-migration-or-displacement 4 https://www.pacom.mil/About-USINDOPACOM/

References Besley, T. J., & Dixit, A. K. (2017, January). CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP11802. Available at Comparing Alternative Policies Against Environmental Catastrophes. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2908215 Centeno, M. A., Nag, M., Patterson, T., Shaver, A., & Windawi, J. (2015). The emergence of global systemic risk. Annual Review of Sociology, 41(1), 65–85. https:// doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112317 Park, S. (2022). The politics of 21st century environmental disasters. Environmental Politics, 31(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2021.2024718 Wiedmann, T., Lenzen, M., Keyßer, L. T., & Steinberger, J. K. (2020). Scientists’ warning on affluence. Nature Communications, 11(1), 3107. https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41467-020-16941-y

Chapter 13

Postscript Zombie education and culture in the global apocalypse: Pedagogies of the walking dead Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley Zombies are now ubiquitous in Western popular.1 There are films, TV shows (even National Geographic Channel shows The Truth Behind Zombies), video games, books, pub crawls and organized zombie-themed events such as zombie walks, zombie runs and zombie hunts where people dress up and act as zombies for fun for a short time. ‘Even saying you “feel like a zombie” has specific meanings – we conjure images of slovenly or sluggish appearance or behavior’.2 Marketing campaigns in USA (Doritos, FedEx, Starburst, Converse and Chevrolet) picked up the zombie theme, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)’s tongue-in-cheek disaster preparedness campaign slogan was: ‘If you’re ready for a zombie apocalypse, then you’re ready for any emergency.’ …. By the mere creation of the CDC’s zombie campaign, the government agency tells audiences that they should prep for a hurricane, too – it’s just as likely to turn lives upside down as any zombie invasion.2 A ‘zombie’ is a term from the Haitian French, from Haitian folklore, to depict a dead body reanimated through magic, connoting fear, horror and a revulsion towards apathy and sloth. ‘Zombie’ was first recorded in 1819 in English by a poet in a history of Brazil. Literary antecedents that draw on European folklore of the undead include Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. There has been an upsurge of use of the subject in popular culture since the early twentieth century such that zombie culture is found in horror and fantasy genres, for example a 1932 film directed by Victor Halperin, starring Bela Lugosi, White Zombie’s plot saw Madeline reuniting with her fiancé Neil on arrival in Haiti. They meet Murder Legendre, a voodoo master. Neil enlists the help of Murder to persuade Madeline to marry him by turning her into a zombie. After the wedding, she dies. After pushing Murder off a cliff, Madeline is released from her zombie state. A 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, became a cult classic and selected as a film of cultural significance by the National Film Registry. It drew on I am Legend, a 1954 science fiction novel that popularized the idea of apocalypse due to disease. Thriller, 1982, the song, album and music video by Michael Jackson, was added to the National Film Registry by the Library DOI: 10.4324/9781003453895-14

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of Congress in 2009, the first music video ever selected. At 14 minutes, the video is substantially longer than the song. Its narrative featuring Jackson and actress Ola Ray in a setting heavily inspired by horror films of the 1950s features ­Michael Jackson leading an iconic dance with actors dressed as zombies. Despite some criticism for its occult theme and violent imagery, the video received high critical acclaim and remains immensely popular. ‘The Walking Dead’ is a US TV series about a central character who awakens from a month-long coma to find an apocalyptic world overrun by flesh-eating zombies. The series is currently in its fifth season and had a strong critical reception and high ratings.3 Hollywood is overrun by zombies and bloodsucking vampires. One wonders why the USA has become a zombie-obsessed vampiric culture. One explanation proffered is that apocalyptic fictional narratives like ‘The Walking Dead’ provide an opportunity to work through the trauma of the breakdown of ethical frameworks that were shattered because of World War II or, perhaps, of the endless appetite for human violence demonstrated in a multipolar world with the rise of the non-state actor. Zombie-ism has also been further titillated by media stories of gruesome murders involving cannibalism. Some argue these dramas are essentially about us – the dark side that emphasizes what happens when humanity loses its ethical way. Nicholas Barber (2013) of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) explains: It’s now more than a decade since zombies began their relentless shuffle into the mainstream of popular culture …. By the time Brad Pitt’s ‘World War Z’ was released in June, it seemed it was several years late to the party. Surely there was nothing new to be said about the undead? That tardiness, along with reports of the films troubled production, suggested that ‘World War Z’ would die a death at the box office. Instead, it went on to rake in $540 m, making it one of 2013s ten biggest blockbusters …. And zombie fever hasn’t been confined to cinemas. He goes on to speculate: It can’t be a coincidence, then, that zombies are in vogue during a period when banks are failing, when climate change is playing havoc with weather patterns, and when both terrorist bombers and global corporations seem to be beyond the reach of any country’s jurisdiction. It can’t be a coincidence, either, that the fourth season of ‘The Walking Dead’ got off to its hugely successful start just weeks after the United States federal government shut down.4 Barber first raised his concerns about the meaning of zombie culture a decade ago, although it has showed no signs of waning. Zombie culture arguably entails a widespread cultural critique. In ‘Dead Man Still Walking: Explaining the Zombie Renaissance’ (2009), literary and film scholar Kyle Bishop

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explains how the zombie metaphor reflects consumerism, public health and politics. He notes the critique of consumer culture in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, where zombies try to break down the doors of a mall so they can shop. Cook (2013) notes that: The indoctrination of youth via the education system is another example of zombism in our society; when young people are taught to memorize facts and prepare so they may perform well on standardized tests, thinking is not required. Like zombies, the students aren’t expected to think, just ‘do.’ The figure of the zombie, taken in isolation, thus encapsulates a cultural anxiety of loss. The zombie narrative is striking in how similar it tends to be the mysterious outbreak of a plague (either literal or figurative, but always infectious, and usually transmitted through a bite) that transforms people into the living dead. In the long-established tradition of the ‘zombie apocalypse’ in television, novels, and film, a cause is rarely specified, and when it is, it is only as a vague afterthought, lip service to some kind of coherent background narrative. Because really, the audience doesn’t need a cause. We feel like we already know it. The cause is us.2 This genre and tradition have reasserted itself as a form of thinking strongly relevant to framing thought concerning philosophy and education in the ‘end times’ – an apocalyptic tradition that is deeply rooted in Judaic and Christian narratives as a source of revelatory literature (Peters, 2011). The current conceptualization of the Anthropocene era is one where we are threatened by ecological, nuclear and biological extinction. Without specifying it, the first half of Derrida’s ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, a chapter that focuses on the notion that writing is pharmakon (a composite of three meanings: remedy, poison and scapegoat), suggests ‘zombies’ (Derrida, 1981). Zombies represent in many ways the logical extension of Derrida’s discussion of how writing inherently ‘infects’ and dampens the mind, putting memory to sleep and, by extension, eroding all our related faculties. Derrida articulates an anxiety that circulates widely in mainstream criticism of new media and technology. This is the idea that we are being hollowed out by our use of technology externalizing everything essential to our nature, thus effectively severing ourselves from our own humanity.5 Derrida (1984a) writes of an apocalyptic tone in philosophy examining Kant’s text and the risk of nuclear war and with the total destruction of humanity (Derrida, 1984b). We use the term ‘Pedagogies of the Walking Dead’ because the global situation has changed so dramatically since the Brazilian educational philosopher Paulo Freire (1970) wrote and published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in Portuguese in 1968, and in English in 1970 (Peters & Besley, 2015). Freire’s work based itself on phenomenological and existentialist Marxism, essentially a humanist blend of Continental philosophy with an early Marx class orientation. It was imbued with sixties optimism, upbeat with human agency in changing

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the world for the better and for changing ourselves through the practice of freedom. It emphasized popular education and critical consciousness – the exact opposite of zombie-culture – and teaching for social justice. It spawned ‘critical pedagogy’ based on educational praxis through critical thinking and critical literacy, of learning to read the word by reading the world. It promised equality and hope. Today, after 35 years of neoliberalism – of the erosion of public education systems, attacks on teachers and public intellectuals, of privatization strategies and of new national testing and accountability regimes – the fire of pedagogical hope first lit up by Freire and carried forward by a generation of critical educators seems less a raging bonfire than a scramble to keep alive the embers. The fire has not gone out, but the public teaching profession is controlled and regulated by State agencies and often vilified by those on the Right, mostly free-marketeers who in a self-serving way want to profit on the misery of the next generation of school children who are now forced to pay their way. They have been cannibalized by a system that feeds on its youth. Currently, US student loans have exceeded $1.2 trillion dollars and become the second largest form of mortgage after housing even though Biden has recently introduced a program of debt forgiveness. Schools have become marketplaces, students have become consumers and curricula have become commodities, as have all the digital software, books and teaching equipment. Pedagogies are now technical recipes provided by big tech and publishing companies, supplemented by tech-support, MOOCs and other broadcast, one-way media. ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ has become the ‘Pedagogy of the Walking Dead’ as teachers are centrally regulated not only in the curriculum and syllabi by having to teach to targets and standards but also prescribed in terms of pedagogy and the style of teaching with little or no opportunity to raise a critical voice. In ‘Life in Limbo’, the Editors of Turbulence make clear the case for zombie neoliberalism: Neoliberalism is dead but it doesn’t seem to realise it. Although the project no longer makes sense, its logic keeps stumbling on, like a zombie in a 1970s splatter movie: ugly, persistent and dangerous. If no new middle ground is able to cohere sufficiently to replace it, this situation could last a while … all the major crises – economic, climate, food, energy – will remain unresolved; stagnation and long-term drift will set in. Such is the ‘unlife’ of a zombie, a body stripped of its goals, unable to adjust itself to the future, unable to make plans. A zombie can only act habitually, continuing to operate even as it decomposes. Isn’t this where we find ourselves today, in the world of zombie-liberalism? The body of neoliberalism staggers on, but without direction or teleology.6 Chris Harman (2010) in Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx comments on how the ‘shadow’ banking system based on speculation

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and unrealistic credit extension wreaked havoc on world markets and left human misery and devastation in its wake. Following the 2008 crisis, many commentators talked about ‘zombie banks’ that were ‘undead’ in the sense that they were no longer functional or capable of achieving human goals. Harman argues that the whole system has become a zombie system. Fred Bottling (2013) documents the ‘Attack of Zombie Debt’ that records the return of long-term uncollected bad debts that are not written off but return after they are sold as low rates to specialized collection agencies. He writes: Zombie debt is another manifestation of an apparently contagious association between finance and the walking dead. Like zombie economics, zombie banks, and zombie capitalism, the phrase seems to follow the logic of Ulrich Beck’s ‘zombie categories’ of modernity, in which old ideas, institutions, or practices persist despite having little currency, relevance, or credibility. The figures return, however, also takes its generic bearings from a longer-standing gothic political-economic lexicon that goes at least as far back as Capital’s images of industrial monstrosity and dead labor feeding on living, working bodies.7 Michael Sauga (2014) argues that capitalism has gone off the rails and does not service humanity’s needs lead to the financial deformation of the system. He echoes the thoughts of many: we are, in fact, living through a historic period tied to the image of the zombie because the system which dictates and dominates our globe, from the world-markets to the workplace to the propaganda machines, and I do not hesitate to name it – capitalism, has in fact zombified right before our eyes, transforming into a monster that threatens to tear all of our lives apart, unless we can find some way to annihilate the sucker, or at the very least evade it until its virus extinguishes itself in an orgy of self-destruction.8 After nearly four decades of neoliberal capitalism, the question is whether there is a space to pursue critical pedagogy? In the neoliberal classroom, has pedagogy become sanitized and lifeless – the pedagogy the walking dead? Are schools now only laboratories for producing digital labor in much the same way that industrial schools produced labor for factories? Are we entering a post-pedagogical era? Does neoliberalism leave any room at all for social conscience, for critical reflection, for the teachers’ voice and, perhaps even more importantly, the students’ voice and for democratic action in the apocalypse? Let us not sleepwalk to the end of the Earth either to a sudden collapse of violent storms, extreme weather events, endless droughts, sea rises and species depletion or a slow decline that deprives those who are already disadvantaged in the world system, unable to feed, shelter or education their children.

142  Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley

Notes 1 This is based on a presentation ‘Apocalyptic Philosophy, Zombie Culture and Pedagogies of the Walking Dead’ by Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley at the New Zealand Association for Research in Education Annual Conference, University of Waikato, 2017. 2 https://contexts.org/articles/the-cultural-life-of-the-living-dead/ 3 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1520211/ 4 https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20131025-zombie-nation 5 https://bibliotechne.wordpress.com/2013/09/26/derrida-and-the-zombieapocalypse/ 6 http://www.turbulence.org.uk/index.html@p=345.html 7 https://www.pomocultur e.org/2016/09/10/undead-ends-zombiedebtzombie-theory/ 8 https://endofcapitalism.com/2012/11/27/the-arrival-of-zombie-capitalism/

References Barber, N. (2013). Why are zombies still so popular? Retrieved from https://www. bbc.com/culture/article/20131025-zombie-nation Bishop, K. (2009). Dead man still walking: Explaining the zombie renaissance. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 37(1), 16–25. Bottling, F. (2013). Undead-ends: Zombie debt/zombie theory. Postmodern Culture. Retrieved from https://www.pomoculture.org/2016/09/10/undeadends-zombie-debtzombie-theory/ Cook, D. N. (2013). The cultural life of the living dead. Contexts: Understanding People in their Social Worlds. Retrieved from https://contexts.org/articles/the-culturallife-of-the-living-dead/ Derrida, J. (1981). Plato’s pharmacy In Dissemination (trans. B. Johnson, pp. 63–171). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from http://www.occt.ox.ac. uk/sites/default/files/derrida_platos_pharmacy.pdf Derrida, J. (1984a). Of an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy (J. P. Leavey, trans.). Oxford Literary Review, 6(2), 3–37. Retrieved 31 January 2023 from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43973661 Derrida, J. (1984b). No apocalypse, not now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives) (C. Porter and P. Lewis, trans.). Diacritics, 14(2), (Summer 1984), 20–31. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. 30th Anniversary Edition (M. Bergman Ramos, trans., with an Introduction by Donaldo Macedo). New York, NY: Continuum. Harman, C. (2010). Zombie capitalism: Global crisis and the relevance of Marx. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Peters, M. A. (2011). The last book of postmodernism. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Peters, M. A., & Besley, T. (2015). Paulo Freire: The global legacy. Peter Lang. Sauga, M. (2014). The zombie system: How capitalism has gone off the rails. Retrieved from https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/capitalism-in-crisis-amidslow-growth-and-growing-inequality-a-998598.html

Index

About the Essence of Consciousness of Law 50 Afghanistan 36, 37, 42, 55, 109, 110, 134; American power, limits 36–44 The Age of Catastrophe? 38 Aldrovandi, C. 109 Alessandri, A. 108 Allardyce, G. 17 America at the crossroads: Democracy, power, and the neoconservative legacy 20 Andreotti, Vanessa 113 Anthropocene 28, 60, 61, 63–65, 67, 69, 71, 72, 79; life and death in 60–75 apocalypse of John 2 apocalyptic age: peace studies in 54–58 apocalyptic curriculum 9 apocalyptic philosophy 1, 5–9, 23–34 ‘The apocalyptic problematic in Italian anthropology’ 101–103 apocalyptic prophecy 3 apocalyptic thinking 1–2, 9, 33, 105, 111, 135 ‘an apocalyptic tone in philosophy’ 31–33 Armageddon club 126–130 artificial intelligence (AI) 9 Asia, rise of 41–42 ‘Attack of Zombie Debt’ 141 Barbashin, A. 49, 51 Barber, N. 138 Baylis, M. 122 Bloom, A. 20 Boffey, D. 47

Book of Revelation 3 Bostrom, N. 127, 128 Bottling, F. 141 Brynjolfsson, E. 88 Bugos, S. 48 Cantemir, Dimitrie 25 capitalism 2, 4, 7, 79, 80, 103, 105, 141 Castoriadis, C. 6 Cavell, S. 33 Ceballos, G. 128 Charbonnier, Pierre 39 ChatGPT-4 9 Christian fascism 8, 47–53 citizen science 8, 79, 84–98 civilization 11–14, 16, 17, 19, 23, 24, 27, 30, 38, 41; as civitas 12–13; collapse 23–34; as pedagogical concept 17–21; studies 27–29; as technological system 11–12 civil society 11–16, 20, 77, 80, 81; history of 12, 13 climate changes 60–75 climate crisis 60, 68–70 cognitive science 88 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed 38 The Collapse of Complex Societies 38 collapsology 38–40 Collins, H. M. 85 The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance 118 consciousness of law 50, 52 convergence science 86, 88 Cook, D. N. 139 Cornwell, R. 55 Crossley, J. 30

144 Index cultural apocalypse 8–9, 101–115; reclaimed 110–112 cultures 5, 6, 17, 19, 23, 24, 27, 29, 32, 33, 109–112 cybernetics 7 Daszak, P. 118 Davis, W. 42 Dawkins, R. 121 Dawn of the Dead 139 ‘Dead Man Still Walking: Explaining the Zombie Renaissance’ 138 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 37, 43 The Decline of the West 5 declinism 36–44 Deleuze, G. 103–105 deliberative democracy 81, 82, 93 De Martino, E. 101, 102, 108–110 democracy 76–77 Derrida, J. 31, 139; ‘apocalyptic tone’ 105–108 Design for Ecological Democracy 78 Dewey, J. 81 Diamond, J. 38 Dirzo, R. 128 discourses 36–44 Dobson, A. 82, 93 domestication 123, 124 The Downfall of the Occident 23 Drury, S. 20 Dryzek, J. S. 82, 93 Dugin, A. 51, 52 Eckersley, R. 82, 93 ecological democracy (ED) 8, 76–81, 93; education for 80–82; origins and possibilities 79–80 ecological imperialism 8 ecosystem changes 60–75 educational philosophy and theory (EPAT) 9, 64 Education and Democracy 81 Ehrlich, P. R. 38, 128 Elias, Norbert: The Civilizing Process 16–17 Elster, J. 114 The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking 6 Enfield, Nick 91 eschatological narratives 23–34 eschatology 107, 108

An Essay on The History of Civil Society 13 ‘The Eternal Recurrence of the Same’ 108 European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) 94 Evans, R. J. 85 extended peer communities 91, 92 Farnetti, Tobia 108 fascism 50–52 Fauci, A. 119, 120 Ferguson, A. 13–15; history of civil society 13–16 Ferguson, N. 42 Floridi, L. 95 forever war, end of 36–38 Form and Actuality 23 fossil fuel industry 67, 68 Foucault, M. 15 The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia 52 The Fourth Political Theory 52 Freire, Paulo 139 Fukuyama, Francis 20 Funtowicz, S. O. 86, 92 Garret, L. 118 The Gay Science 6 ‘The General Characteristics of Human Nature’ 13 geopolitical overreach 40 Germany 16, 17, 25, 79, 80, 114 Gibbon, Edward 25, 37, 43 Gibbons, Edward 24; decline and fall of Rome 24–27 Gladstone, Rick 54 global apocalypse 1–10, 137–142 global risk assessment 9 Gluckman, Peter 89, 90 ‘God is Dead’ 6 González-Gaudiano, E. 81 Gordon, R. 42 Gott, R. J. III. 127 great power competition (GPC) 8 Green Paper on Citizen Science 87 Gur-Zéev, I. 55 Habermas, J. 81 Hache, Emmanuel 39 Halkay, M. 86 Harman, C. 140, 141

Index 145 Hartog, François 38 Harvey, M. 4 Hedges, C. 52 Hegel, G. W. F. 41 Heidegger, M. 7, 20, 32, 85, 112 Hester, R. 78 historic civilisations 27, 28 historiography 2, 23, 25 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 25 History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire 25 How everything can collapse: A manual for our times 38 human activity 63, 65, 123, 134 human history 55, 88, 104, 124, 134 humanity 131; future, education 126–130 human nature 13–15 Ilyin, Ivan 49, 52 The Independent 55 Investigations 33 Jackson, S. 80 Jacquette, Rogene 54 James, C. L. R. 4 Jandu, N. 123 John of Patmos 2 Judeo-Christian tradition 30, 102, 103 Kagan, Robert 40 Kaku, M. 11, 127 Kardashev, Nikolai 11 Karpińska, A. 92 Kennedy, Paul 40 Keynes, J. M. 114 Keyßer, L. T. 134 Kline, G. L. 104 knowledge, democratising 84–98 Korda, M. 49 Krell, David F. 108 Kristensen, Hans M. 49 Kristensen, M. 49 Kuhn, Thomas 84 Kumar, K. 41 Kurtz, S. 18, 20 The Last Book of Postmodernism 33 Lederberg, Joshua 118 Lenzen, M. 134

Leo Strauss and the American Right 20 limited nuclear war: dangers of 47–53 The Lost History of Western Civilization 18, 20 Luke, K. 27 Malthus, Thomas 38 Marx, Karl 7, 38, 103–105 Massenzio, M. 108 Matthew, Richard 71 McFee, A. 88 McGregor, S. 55 Medvedev, Dmitry 47 Mendes, S. 80 military overreach 40 Mills, M. 55 Mladenović, B. 85 Momigliano, A. 25, 26 Morand, S. 122 Morens, D. 119, 120 Movimenti religiosi di libertà e di salvezza dei popoli oppressi 101 multiculturalism 19, 81 The Nation 42 National-Socialism: The New Spirit 50 neoliberalism 79, 80, 140, 141 New Testament 3 Nicolet, C. 12 Nietzsche, F. 6, 20, 103–105; as apocalyptic thinker 103–105 Nietzsche and Philosophy 104 Nietzsche II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same 108 Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being 108 Noël, Romain 39 normal science 84 Nuccitelli, D. 129 nuclear arsenal 49, 54, 55 nuclear deterrence 47, 48 nuclear war 48, 54, 55, 57, 58, 139; threat of 54–58 nuclear weapons 47–49, 54, 55, 57, 63, 135; use of 47, 48, 63 On Fascism 50 openness 13, 87 Pacholski, Richard 57 Pakistan 37, 55

146 Index Pálinkás, M. 39 pandemic era 117–124 Paris Agreement 61, 64, 66, 67, 76, 77, 79 Park, S. 134 Parrish, C. 123 Paul, J. 6 peace 8, 14, 55, 56, 81, 114, 133 peace education 55, 56, 133 Pedagogy of the Oppressed 139 Perspectives of World History 23 Peters, M. A. 81 philosophical discourses 31, 32, 108 Pinker, S. 56 Plumwood, V. 82, 93 Pocock, J. G. A. 25 Politics of the Anthropocene 38 post-apocalyptic thinking: European style of 113–115 postmodernism 1, 6, 19, 32, 33, 105 ‘post-normal science’ (PNS) 84–98 post-truth 84–98 potential civilisation collapse 60–75 psychopathology 108–110 Putin, Vladimir 47 ‘radical’ ecological democracy (RED) 78 rationality 33, 48, 85, 112, 113 Ravetz, J. R. 86, 92 responsibility, socialising 84–98 reversible reckoning 113–115 revolutionary science 84 Rise and Fall of the Great Powers 40 The Road to Unfreedom 51 Robertson, N. 20 Robock, A. 55 Rose, D. C. 92 Russia 37, 40, 43, 47, 49, 50, 52, 55, 110 Russian apocalypse 47–53 Russian Federation 47, 48, 52, 110 Sagan, Carl 12 Said, E. 115 Salerno, Gabriel 39 Sauga, M. 141 Schroder, Gerhard 79, 80 science 6, 7, 60, 84–92, 94, 96, 119; history of 84

scientific evidence 65, 93 Scuralli, N. 26 The Second Machine Age 88 Servigne, Pablo 38 Sinaï, A. 38 Snyder, T. 51 Spengler, O 5, 23, 24, 41 state-owned enterprises (SOE) 5 Steinberger, J. K. 134 Stevens, Raphaël 38 Stewart, Charles 108 Strauss, Leo 19, 20 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 84 survival skills 62, 69, 71, 72 sustainable development 69, 77 Synder, T. 51 systemic global catastrophic risks 132–136; astronomical 132; biological 132; cultural & literary 132; religious & eschatological 132; socio-political & economic 132; technological 132 Tainter, J. 38 Taliban 36, 37 Thacker, E. 39 Thus Spake Zarathrustra 6 Toon, O. 55 Toynbee, Arnold J. 25 transformation 16, 80, 87, 93, 110 Trifonas, P. 55 Ukraine 47–49, 51, 52, 110, 115, 131, 135 US declinism 42–43 viral host switching 123 Wagner 109 Wapner, Paul 71 Wardeh, M. 122 Watson, D. 95 Wells, K. 122 West: decline of 41–42 Western apocalypse 1–5 Western civilization 11–21; apocalyptic works in 29–31; historiography and decline of 23–24 Western colonial domination 101–115 Western philosophy 3, 20, 107, 110–112

Index 147 Wiedmann, T. 134 Williams, Eric 4 world civilizations 7, 12 world system 4, 5, 135, 141 Wright, B. 55 Xia, L. 55

Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx 140 zombies 9, 137–141; culture 132, 137, 138; education and culture 137–142; global apocalypse 137–142; pedagogies 137–142