of life’s purpose and meaning, it is nothing less than utter hypocrisy to condemn those who try to follow this precept but are prevented from doing so by lack of means or proper papers.
When dealing with the racial and cultural politics of the refugee, you have used the metaphor “setting fears afloat” to emphasize how the refugee has become the signifier upon which many of our contemporary fears and anxieties are projected. Mindful of what you address above in respect to the politics of (in)security, is there not a danger that the heightened focus on the refugee adds to the scapegoating by presenting the problem as defining of our times (hence truly polarizing the debate and driving it to the extremes)?
As Hegel warned nearly two centuries ago, the owl of Minerva, that goddess of wisdom, spreads its wings at dusk. By this I mean that we tend to learn only what defines “our times” in retrospect, once they are over. And rarely even in hindsight do we learn this definitely. Eric Hobsbawm, perhaps the greatest historian of the modern era, gathered courage to attach the name of the “Age of Extremes” to the twentieth century only in 1994. And even then he felt the need to apologize for such attachments:
Nobody can write the history of the twentieth century like that of any other era, if only because nobody can write about his or her lifetime as one can (and must) write about a period known only from outside, at second or third-hand, from sources of the period or the works of later historians. . . . This is one reason why under my professional hat as a historian I avoided working on the era since 1914 for most of my career.
Let’s heed the advice/warning by the great historian and resist the temptation to overemphasize what Thomas Hylland Eriksen has called, with particular reference to the power of the media, the “tyranny of the moment.” The refugees might have indeed more entitlements than most other categories to hold the status of “the defining scapegoats” of “our times”—but for how long? In my latest book I write that our insecurities keep “floating,” as none of the anchors we cast proves to be solid enough to hold them in place with any degree of permanence. So it may go with the refugee, who embodies in the clearest way the liquidity of fear in the contemporary moment. Right now, at least, that liquidity creates a sort of affinity between the strangers at our doors and the mysterious, seemingly omnipotent global forces that pushed them there. Both stay staunchly beyond our reach and control, ignoring our deepest wishes and our most ingenious “solutions.”
It is arguable that one of the “intellectual casualties” of the war on terror has been the humanitarian ideal that the world might be transformed for the better. Do we perhaps need a new humanism for the twenty-first century?
In his Cosmopolitan Vision, Ulrich Beck captured the predicament brilliantly: we have been already cast (without having been asked) into a cosmopolitan condition of universal, humanity-wide interdependence. But we are still missing, and have not yet started in earnest to compose and acquire, an accompanying cosmopolitan awareness. This creates a kind of cultural lag, as William Fielding Ogburn would call it, the evidence of which is the treatment of the refugee. They may well remain the collateral victims of this lack of understanding until such time that we try in earnest to attend to that lag’s institutional, state-based foundations.
As Benjamin Barber crisply put it in his manifesto, If Mayors Ruled the World, “today, after a long history of regional success, the nation-state is failing us on the global scale. It was the perfect political recipe for the liberty and independence of autonomous peoples and nations. It is utterly unsuited for interdependence.” He sees that nation-states are singularly unfit to tackle the challenges arising from our planet-wide interdependence, in that they are “too inclined by their nature to rivalry and mutual exclusion” and appear “quintessentially indisposed to cooperation and incapable of establishing global common goods.”
I trace much of the problem to the growing separation between power and politics, a rift that results in powers free from political constraints and a politics that is suffering a constant and growing deficit of power. Powers, particularly those most heavily influencing the human condition and humanity’s prospects, are today global, roaming ever more freely in (to use the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells’s words) the “space of flows” while ignoring at will the borders, laws, and internally defined interests of political entities—whereas the extant instruments of political action remain, as they were a century or two ago, fixed and confined to the “space of places,” that of states. Alternative “historical agents” are much in demand, and one may surmise that until they are found and put in place, debating the models of a “good” or at least a “better” society will seem to be an idle pastime—and except in the extreme margins of the political spectrum won’t arouse much emotion.
All the same, I don’t believe there is a shortcut solution to the current refugee problem. Humanity is in crisis, and there is no exit from that crisis other than the solidarity of humans. The first obstacle on the road to the exit from mutual alienation is the refusal of dialogue: that silence that accompanies self-alienation, aloofness, inattention, disregard, and indifference. Instead of the duo of love and hate, the dialectical process of border-drawing needs to be thought therefore in terms of the triad of love, hate, and indifference or neglect that the refugee, in particular, continues to face.
FIVE
OUR CRIME AGAINST THE PLANET AND OURSELVES
We are both offenders and victims. But some are more guilty than others.
While mainstream discourse continues to debate whether or not catastrophic climate change is caused by humans, discussions about what sort of disasters we’re facing—and how they might yet be prevented—are stymied. Throughout her career, Australian philosopher Adrian Parr has addressed the problems of environmental degradation as being inseparable from the vise grip that capitalism has on our lives and political imaginations. Against a neoliberal landscape that might recognize the dangers of climate change but deploys a language of perpetrator-free disaster, Parr insists that we understand environmental degradation as not only a form of mass violence but also a crime against humanity, which demands no less than a questioning of what it means to be a human. Here we discuss why it matters to talk about the environment in terms of structural violence, and what justice could even look like for a crime in which we are all—to differing degrees—both perpetrators and victims.
Natasha Lennard interviews Adrian Parr
May 18, 2016
Adrian Parr is a professor of environmental politics and cultural criticism at the University of Cincinnati and the director of the Taft Research Center. Her books include The Wrath of Capital and Birth of a New Earth: The Radical Politics of Environmentalism.
Natasha Lennard: In your work, you raise the idea of framing climate degradation as a form of violence and potentially as a crime against humanity. What does it mean to speak of the human destruction of the climate in terms of criminal justice? Is there a distinct guilty party that can be held responsible for this crime?
Adrian Parr: There are three components to the claim that environmental degradation is a crime against humanity. First, it is an appeal to a universal, common humanity that stretches across space and time and that is oblivious to geographic and historical differences. Second, the crime in question is an existential one that is committed against the very experience of being human, the human élan. Third, it is a crime that calls the established legal order into question, because everyone, yet no one specifically, can be held responsible.
What is the nature of this crime? The human species is the agent of a terrible injustice being perpetrated against other species, future generations, ecosystems, and our fellow human beings. Examples include contaminated waterways, mass species extinction, massive fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, and unsustainable rates of deforestation, to name just a few. This is leading to extreme and more frequent weather events, expanding deserts, loss of biodiversity, collapsing ecosystems, water depletion and contamination, and the rise of global sea levels.
However, humans are not all equally guilty of this crime. Some, such as those advancing the interests of the fossil-fuel industry, or those whose high-income