Climate defeatism and moral abdication

As the attraction of Scylla recedes, Professor Clive Hamilton finds himself drawn towards Charybdis. But as liberal reform of the global economic system seems less likely, do we really have to accept doom-laden reaction?

Hamilton’s Negotiating the End of the World: Kant, Schmitt, and the Global Climate Struggle is an original, ambitious and equally impassioned examination, through the lens of philosophy, of the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) process that had manifestly failed to deliver us from climate calamity.

The professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia, uses Immanuel Kant (1724 to 1804), the European Enlightenment philosopher known for the categorical imperative, as a stand-in for “common interest, universal moral duties, multilateralism, and the preeminence of science”. Kant’s “vision of a voluntary federation of states in a ‘league of nations’ anticipated the structure of the UNFCCC.”

Glossed

And pitted against him is Carl Schmitt (1888 to 1985), the intellectual of Nazism, who is here the poster boy for the aspect of humanity which, in Hamilton’s words, “leans towards disorder, violence, conflict, and chaos.” Thus, “Schmittians emphasize state sovereignty, strategic competition, and deals struck between the powerful few”. He also adds: “Schmitt never renounced or expressed regret about his engagement with the Nazis.”

Hamilton’s conceit is that the COPs — from the founding of the UNFCCC at the first Rio Earth Summit in 1992 through to the most recent climate jamboree in Brazil just last November — has been an enormous contest between these two conflicting ways of being human. He argues that “all of us are the often-unwitting puppets of ideas…” Participants at the COP conferences, and by extension all those involved in climate discourse, “have been wrestling unwittingly with the conflict between Kantian and Schmittian viewpoints.”

His radical, and sobering, conclusion is that the universalist, internationalist, cooperative vision articulated through Kant has failed to materialise. The global experiment draws to a close, and the results cannot be avoided. Humanity has fundamentally failed to unite and save itself. Unfortunately, Hamilton’s summary of both Kant and Schmitt is perhaps too perfunctory to be generally useful, or as he says: “I have glossed over complexities and contradictions in their thought”. Kant’s vulgar and explicit racism is ignored.

Oil

The dark conclusion that we must confront is that Schmitt and others like him have been vindicated and the world is naturally dominated by great powers who operate through a friend-enemy mindset. We as human beings would rather fight over resources — wealth, power, status, and nature’s gifts — right up until the point that this conflict destroys everyone and everything.