Good afternoon, beloved —
Today I'd like to share with you the longest piece I've ever published as one of these dispatches. It's another outtake from Beyond Hope, and it concerns one of the more notable ways in which people have historically tended to respond to the idea that their way of life is under threat: by embracing fascism, or what I here call "the politics of organized cruelty."
Perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that this ugliest of political dynamics would crop up again, now that so many of our ways of life actually are under threat from the unfolding process of climate systems collapse. I think it's worth taking some time and trouble, though, to understand exactly what's going on in this reflorescence, not least so we can more effectively counter it, contain it and destroy it. That's what I've tried to do here. I'd love to hear your thoughts as to whether or not I succeeded, especially as this is most likely the only way in which this material will ever see the light of day.
§ Every emergency of sufficient scale constitutes an opening. At such moments the world becomes radically indeterminate, in something approaching the classical physical sense, and in that brief span of cloudy uncertainty all manner of new things become possible: new alignments, new configurations, new forms in which power can be articulated. Thus disaster capitalism, which surges in to exploit occasions of systemic breakdown with an unseemly, ghoulish opportunism; thus also, as we shall see, the rather more hopeful tendency now being called disaster anarchism.
If crisis affords an aperture through which all a society’s latent or embryonic tendencies can rush, though, one of the forces-in-potential that perennially waits at the gap for its moment to arrive is fascism, the politics of organized cruelty. It has gone by any number of names and worn any number of masks, but this tendency has always been there, in most every society, and will likely always be with us. The need to reduce a designated other and exult in their humiliation appears to be, if not a permanent, then at least a highly persistent glitch in the human wetware, and its expression in communal form has certainly been a durable feature of mass politics over the past century. It would be both foolish and irresponsible to assume, then, that it would not make itself manifest in some new form suited to the circumstances of our hotter, angrier world — an ecofascism, of mass movements and nominally “lone-wolf” actors both, seething into being as its hour comes round at last. Those of us at greatest risk of harm from the emergence of any such tendency had better invest some effort into understanding what that implies.
I don’t want there to be any ambiguity on this point: none of what follows is an attempt to “explain” why fascists fash, let alone excuse any of their words or deeds. It is, however, an attempt to account for the form the perennial tendency toward fascism takes in our time, so we may learn to recognize it in each of the specific shapes it assumes under the circumstances of the Long Emergency. The more deeply we understand what it offers and how it recruits, the more readily we may prepare for it, account for it, and ultimately defeat it.
§ Appropriately enough for a way of being in the world that inevitably tends toward death, I believe that fascism begins there, too, or more precisely in our helpless terror of it. Each of our encounters with the causes of ordinary suffering — the classic Buddhist tripod of illness, old age and death — ultimately confronts us in one way or another with what psychologists think of as “mortality salience,” the encroaching awareness of the inevitability of our own extinction. This can be tolerable enough under the right conditions: like most of us, I imagine, I’ve often enough looked at a city sidewalk or an ancient sequoia with the thought that the sun and shade and rain will still be falling on them in just the way they do now when I’m long gone from the scene, and in the stillest hours of life this is simply an untroubling set of facts. But outside these moments, the certainty that someday in the not terribly distant future we will simply not be is often a cause of stark and undermining terror.
This is not necessarily a universal, transhistorical truth. Across the breadth of human history, there have been many times and places in which this fear did not grip with quite so much force as it seems to have on us, many peoples even for whom it simply does not appear to have been an issue. One of the primary consolations of profound religious faith, of course, is the degree to which it buffers our fear of extinction; perhaps half of us on Earth, even now, are sustained throughout our days by a sincere belief in a clement afterlife, or the promise of a good reincarnation, as reward for righteous conduct in life. Further, as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Ivan Illich have observed, in those times and places where illness, aging and death are not institutionalized, people tend to die at home. Their bodies are there to be seen and touched by all members of the household, very much including whatever children may reside there. And the terrible aspect of death is in this way demystified, and softened by just that much. Those who are exposed to such experiences early in life, especially, are able to see death as an ordinary aspect of the human experience, both a culmination and a point in the cycle of being and nonbeing we each travel.
But for most of us in industrialized society, illness, age and dying are all things to be managed by professionals. They take place behind an institutional shroud that largely prevents us from experiencing the sights, sounds and smells associated with the process of dying. Death itself remains the ultimate other and the ultimate outside: a limit case or final horizon for thought and feeling both, beyond which all our sensemaking tools are useless. And this is still truer for those of us who confront the end unconsoled by any particularly strong religious faith. We are trapped between the enigmatic nature of death, our strong attachment to life, and the certitude that one day we shall be obliged to let go of it no matter what we want, say or do — and the pain of being caught in this trap can easily be overwhelming.
The body of psychological thought known as terror management theory proposes that much of what we do in life is an unconscious attempt to deny the salience of death, to ward off the intolerable idea of our own erasure. On this theory, much of what we make, build or leave behind is in some way an attempt to compensate for the eventual certainty of our end. Most achieve this by having and nurturing children, to carry their memory safely into a future from which they are absent. Others do it through works, through leaving something of themselves behind in song, in sound, in text, in image or law or the built environment. And of course not a few adopt both of these strategies. As social psychologist Jeff Greenberg puts it, "We keep our terror under control by feeling like we are more than just animals doomed to obliteration, but that we are special beings with a soul and that we will transcend our own deaths either literally or symbolically.”
This theory can shed light on quite a few phenomena that might otherwise resist our attempts to understand them more deeply, including a few that are not immediately obvious candidates for its application. One of these is the domain of politics, or more specifically the politics of the extreme right — because one cultural technology that manages the process of symbolic self-overcoming that Greenberg describes exceptionally well is fascism.
The satisfactions available to adherents of this political tradition would seem as though they hardly need to be elaborated. We’re taught that they begin and end with the surging knowledge of strength worked out on the prone, defenseless body of the enemy — the exercise of utter dominance that Orwell so vividly summed up in the image of a boot stamping on a human face, forever. But in this, I’ve never felt Orwell had it quite right, for the exaltations and affective high notes of fascism extend far beyond those pleasures associated with the untrammeled expression of power. The rewards of belonging to the national community in this way are many and varied: the convinced fascist enjoys an ecstatic release from accountability, as well as the promise of revenge on all those they hold responsible for whatever humiliations they may have experienced in life. Most relevantly to the point at hand, though, fascism offers believers the opportunity to submerge a self that is bound to be unsatisfactory (as all of our selves are) in an idealized collective identity. By facilitating the sublation of one’s identity into something gleaming and stainless and transcendent – a Culture, a Nation, a Faith, a Race – fascism specifically overwrites the shaming awareness of extinction that constitutes mortality salience, and replaces it with a sense of greater purpose. For those who see themselves reflected in this purpose, and are able to blot out the thought that they might someday themselves be next against the wall, this is heady, or rather visceral, stuff, and without question a strong part of what commends this current to potential followers when times turn dark.
This account undoubtedly flirts with a kind of bathos. Surely not everything we put our hand to in life arises out of some undoing fear of death, to begin with; surely nobody has a psyche quite as crudely literal and linear as this. And surely there is more, much more, to fascism than its power to absolve its followers of their terror of nonbeing. But for all the just-so qualities of terror management theory, the notion that much of what we think of as culture is generated in the course of an attempt to manage a low-level, latent and literally unspeakable dread of our own extinction does ring true to me — at least, it would certainly explain a good deal that might otherwise remain obscure. As for the idea that a strong part of what fascism offers its adherents is the dark transcendence of belonging to something that might survive their end? That feels like a conventional enough framing, perhaps even one that verges on the hackneyed — the sort of insight a tired Cinema Studies professor might offer to a class seeing Triumph of the Will for the first time. There is one further aspect of the theory that is not nearly as self-evident, however. It helps to illuminate what drives the turn toward fascism in any place or period, and becomes still more acutely relevant under the physical conditions of the Long Emergency. This is what it implies about the boundary between cultures.
§ There is some indication in the terror-management literature that being reminded of one’s own extinction tends to increase identification with the ingroup and, conversely, disaffiliation with and even hostility toward everyone who does not belong to it.
If we are to follow this line of argument, we must first understand a culture as an archive of everything its members have ever erected to ward off their collective terror of nullity. Its values, its shared texts, its rituals and taboos, its tacit ontology: the theory holds that all of these cultural provisions have been laid down over time because they successfully permit the salience of death to be deferred and held at bay. But this sets us up for conflict at the interface with those hailing from different cultures. This is because, if “culturally-defined beliefs about reality serve a fundamentally death-defying function,” as the terror management theorists Pyszczynski, Solomon and Greenberg argue, then “the mere existence of people with alternative conceptions of reality is problematic.” Anyone marked as Other represents a crack in the psychic armor, a standing rebuke to whatever system of cultural defenses one has erected against death. And as the tension between their conception of reality and one’s own becomes greater, “problematic” shades into unendurable. Put another way: to someone in the grip of unmanaged existential terror, you yourself as an Other of any sort represent a threat vector…and past some critical threshold of difference, the most expedient way to extinguish the threat is to extinguish you.
Happily, of course, most of us at most times do manage to manage our fear of the beckoning void. But there are moments for all of us in which the salience of death becomes especially overwhelming. And worse yet, there are contexts in which it unfolds across the entire space of being, threatening not merely our mortal selves but our legacy, our very posterity. What I’d like to suggest to you is that, much like the never fully-banished and now resurgent specter of nuclear war, the Long Emergency is one of these contexts.
In raising the stakes from individual extinction to one that is collective, or even total, globally perilous circumstances like these fatally undermine any culture’s ability to shield its members from the thought of their own nonbeing. The across-the-board devastation of the ecosystem, the destruction of the structures and infrastructures that sustain communal existence, the prospect that we might one day be set to flight like all the hundreds of millions of others who have met that fate before us, the debility visible all around us: all of these persistent qualities of life in the Long Emergency threaten to undo the very mechanisms that allow us to endure the recognition that we ourselves are mortal. And it is worth giving some thought to how this works.
In the neuroscientist David Eagleman’s rather lovely formulation, everyone dies three deaths: the first “when the body ceases to function,” again “when the body is consigned to the grave,” and for a third and final time upon “that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” This logic invites us to see what cultural production is for, maybe in the end much of what culture even is: an organized set of provisions for deferring the moment of that third dying for as long as possible. A culture is a mesh of connections that bear the memory of one’s name out past the death of the body, and further out into time. For the overwhelming majority of us, that mesh is mostly woven of familial bonds, and for all the intimacy and affective intensity involved, extends a few generations, at best; only very few manage to leave their name in the common record, for good or bad, in a way that carries it down across the centuries. But even the mightiest contributions rely for their commemoration on some Ozymandian gamble on the durability of materials — and whether stele, scriptorium, wax cylinder or blockchain, no record of our words and deeds will endure forever. Perhaps, if we have achieved something very special indeed, our tale may be rendered in verse, to be sung anew whenever our people gather, down through the long years. The rest is vanity, in every sense of the word.
This is what the worst scenarios of runaway global heating threaten to annihilate: not simply our own bodily being, but every physical or cultural trace that we ever existed, every strand that binds us to something larger and more perdurable. By imperiling the survival of the mesh of relations that enfolds us and lends meaning to all our deeds, the new state of the atmosphere promises to obliterate, in fairly short order, everyone who might remember us, all of the causes or communities to which we’ve dedicated our acts in life, and all of the mnemotechnical or institutional systems we’ve ever engineered to secure our memory against time. The threat is rather more than existential, tending strongly in the direction of ontological. I think of it as nihility.
Even if no such nullifying event ever comes to pass, though, the very vividity with which we imagine that it might catalyzes real trouble for us in the present, racking up damage in our time like a shockwave traveling backward from some calamity in the future. The unacknowledged terror of collective erasure is such, firstly, that it often prevents us from addressing the thing that is happening to us, and planning effectively to forestall it — as Jem Bendell points out, this is likely up there with a structural addiction to growth as one of the major reasons climate action is endlessly deferred or displaced or watered down. Here, ironically, it is our very fear of the worst-case scenario that may undermine all our efforts to prevent it from coming to pass, with consequences that are plain to see everywhere around us. But that fear also damages our collective prospects in what it does to us as individuals. It forces some, not a few, back into the fiercest defense of a culture and a lifeworld they perceive to be under imminent threat of annihilation.
One interpretation of terror management theory (and you can assume it is mine) suggests that, when faced with the bearers of a culture that abominably contradicts the death-defying provisions taught by one’s own, some lash out in an attempt to not even destroy but unmake the threat. And this appears to be true with redoubled force in those who are already feeling their privilege ebbing away.
And really, this is because the loss of power presently being experienced by those with privilege has something of a dual valence. The injury of evaporating power consists both in that it is just that, i.e. a progressive curtailment of the ability to exert one’s will upon the world, and also that this functions as a reminder of one’s dwindling life energies, and eventual departure from existence. When the instinct to defend one’s own culture at all costs is coupled with such forms of elite precarity — of which white and male fragility are all-too-familiar examples — the stage is set for overwhelming acts of preemptive violence. Again, these are acts designed and intended not merely to defeat but to erase the Other, as a harbinger of cultural nihilation.
None of this in itself is sufficient to produce a monster – and a very good thing, too, or we’d be far worse off even than we already are. But people who were taught that the various hierarchies they sit atop of are natural, or even ordained by the Creator, become dangerous when the contingency of those hierarchies is first made plain, for “equality feels like oppression when all you’ve known is privilege.” And when the fear of encroaching nihility intersects with someone’s conviction that they are already losing ground that ought to be theirs by birthright, the conditions are right for something surpassingly ugly to emerge.
To restate what I’m getting at here: To be human is in some way to live in constant terror of death. This terror is, however, something we are ordinarily able to manage, and much of the way we do that is via our contribution to and participation in a shared culture, something that can persist and bear meaning long past the end of our own lifetime. As a consequence of global heating, though, we now face a set of circumstances that (at least in principle) threatens the survival of any body of culture to which we have entrusted our memory. This vexes all of us, as it well might, but a privileged subset in each culture still more so. This is because even the ordinary fear of mortality intensifies ingroup/outgroup distinctions, and such distinctions are inscribed still more sharply when the mortality involved is collective or absolute. Under such conditions, the fear of cultural annihilation triggers preemptive responses among those who feel the ingroup/outgroup distinction weakening, for it threatens them both practically and psychologically: not merely their place in society, that is, but also the culturally-specific mechanisms that buffer them against the consciousness of their own inevitable cessation. And finally these unendurable fears come to vest in the body of the Other, opening the way for spectacular acts of preemptive violence aimed at restoring the primacy of the culture to which one is affiliated — and therefore, among other things, its ability to function effectively as a ward against the specter of extinction.
However drastically simplified and schematic this may be, it has the virtue of accounting for much of what we see around us. It is no accident that the current spasms of racist and fascist violence accompany a widespread sense that the future has been foreclosed. We can already see signs of overwhelming, preemptive response developing across the contemporary political landscape, showing up in the spread of so-called “warrior policing,” or the increasingly masks-off, quiet-part-out-loud tenor of political rhetoric on even the mainstream right. Indeed, the desire for all-cleansing acts of violence is increasingly confessed plainly by many of those in its grip, though this still generally takes the form of projection. At the time of writing, United States political discourse in particular bears all the markers of people with existing racial, class or gender privilege, consciously or otherwise planning spectacular acts intended to relieve them of the unbearable burdens of their own dwindling ability to define the situation. As the specter of ecofascism approaches, closing the distance between us and the horizon, the system is once again blinking red. Unless we listen carefully when people tell us explicitly about the things they are planning, and take collective steps to counter their ability to act on their clearly expressed intentions, an enraged atmosphere will be the least of our troubles.
It’s worth considering that the mere potential of social and cultural annihilation may loom differently in the imaginary of peoples who have already experienced some taste of the real thing at the hands of an oppressor. When you’re descended from the survivors of a conscious attempt to extinguish and overwrite their entire culture, that is, a certain disenchantment is one of the things you inherit — and perhaps that very disenchantment confers some degree of immunity to the abstract terror of nihility. It is at the same time both striking and entirely unsurprising to find that people with such experiences in their familial history are statistically insignificant among the perpetrators of spectacular violence.
For all the hazards we face from storm, drought and pandemic disease, the psychic landscape many of us will inhabit across the Long Emergency will be colored too by this particular fear: that we and those we love will fall victim to those intentional acts of violence enacted as a last explosive lunge at control, on the part of those who feel their influence on the world steadily diminishing. And this fear will be reasonable, or at least founded in an demonstrably real pattern of fact — indeed it will undoubtedly contribute, in no small way, to whatever terror of nihility we may ourselves be suffering from. Only the tiniest minority among the privileged populations of the global North, blessedly, will ever decompensate quite so explosively as to result in a body count. The overwhelming majority will find some face-saving accommodation with their reduced status and, just like the rest of us, somehow learn to make their way under the unfriendly skies of a hot and hurting world. But some smaller number will not have the resources of care, the psychic and material supports that permit them to claw their way to any such modus vivendi with self-esteem intact. And when people in the throes of a state of being they experience as unendurable finally reach a limit, and are moved to act, their action is catalyzed by the ideas that are in the air. If we’re interested in circumventing this deathward progression, we’d be well advised to understand what those ideas are, and where they come from.
§ The twentieth-century poet Czesław Miłosz once argued that it is usually via some process of suffering that we come to understand how our fate can be “influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.” The specific philosophy he was thinking of was dialectical materialism, which, having suffered through the Stalinist repression ostensibly mounted in its name, he regarded with especial horror. But he could just as easily have had Heidegger’s Romantic mysticism in mind, or for that matter the differing nihilisms of Nietzsche, Céline or Cioran, for it is possible to trace lines between all of these thought traditions and the eventual conduct of atrocity.
Everything we now know about Stalinism, and its consequences for the peoples of eastern Europe, lends the framing that Miłosz offers us a certain melancholy weight and power. It turns out, though, that he was only half-right. It is certainly the case that philosophical thought has often enough set up currents that later worked themselves out on the historical stage, at the level of lives and bodies. Ideas matter, and perform material work in the world. And it is also the case that it is usually only by way of grim experience that we are forced to concede a connection between some idea that had previously seemed harmlessly obscure and its large-scale effects in the world — for better or worse, we appear to be a species condemned to learn all its most important lessons the hard way. So Miłosz was surely on firm enough ground in arguing that we ought to pay closer attention to the currents of subterranean thought, and to what is implied by them, long before they breach the surface of mainstream awareness, as companions and legitimators of horror. But where he stumbles is in thinking that the ideas capable of giving shape to horror in this way need to be anything richly philosophical in nature.
A case in point is the theory known as the Great Replacement, originally promulgated in its contemporary form by a French novelist and essayist named Renaud Camus. There is nothing particularly intricate or abstruse about his doctrine. As with many of the most dangerous ideas, indeed, it proceeds in straightforward steps from a recognizable kernel of truth. Many societies of the global North are currently undergoing a demographic transition, and becoming ever more diverse in their ethnolinguistic composition. The previously unquestioned privileges and prerogatives of the majority population are being eroded in most of these societies, however slowly and inadequately. These are facts. What Camus proposes, however, is that this demographic transition and the accompanying erosion of privilege have been deliberately engineered, with the aim of “replacing” the white native population with a majority-Muslim one. This is to be accomplished through unrestricted immigration from Muslim lands of the global South, on the one hand, and measures taken to suppress the birth rate of the native population on the other.
One of the things that leaps out at anyone considering this set of ideas from the outside is how oddly and persistently prurient it is. The specific measures ostensibly deployed by the “replacist” elite in their effort to suppress the white-majority birth rate all have this quality to them: we are told that they include the expansion of access to abortion, the full normalization of pornography, the elevation of homosexuality and the promotion of gender identities beyond the traditional binary. It is never made clear why these measures are only supposed to suppress native-born, white, Christian fertility, and not fall equally across the entire population, but the obsessive focus on who is doing what with whom, and in what way, is nonetheless striking. This is the point at which Camus’s particularly French spin on ethnonationalism intersects with older currents in the rhetoric of “white genocide,” for in the long annals of conspiracy, there really is only one party capable of undertaking such a broad program of biopolitical sabotage, and doing so with such perverse glee. And in naming that party, Great Replacement theory leaves Camus behind entirely: in its more recent, global articulations, the agency responsible for this epic act of sociocultural reengineering is none other than “woke capital,” or really the satanic (((rootless cosmopolitans))) that pull its strings. (Thus the slogan chanted by white nationalists at Charlottesville in 2017: “You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!”)
Consider everything this master narrative wraps up, in one neat ideological package. People already suffering from the real consequences of living in late capitalism — among which we might list the shattering of communal life, the transformation of everything into commodity, the elevation of exchange value over and in exclusion to any other kind, the instantaneous global flattening of culture, the shoddy deadening sameness of neoliberal space and the semantic desert of its cant — are assured that there is an identifiable party to blame for their agony. While this party is widely loathed, either having dwindled to a statistically insignificant cosmopolitan minority in most lands, or been outright expelled from them, it retains enough power to manipulate events behind the scenes, in such a way as to compel the importation of a much larger and still racially vigorous proxy force. And this proxy force is rapidly transforming the texture and character of places that have been placidly homogeneous since time immemorial. It isn’t simply that decent ordinary people are now forced to accommodate this alien presence as they go about their business — now the very law commands that these newcomers be catered to, and all the faces smiling down from all the billboards and screens suddenly have a leering, hostile character. The hegemony is sealed, and the triumph of the Other over the good, normal, upright people of the land is complete. You could not possibly devise a scenario more likely to aggravate the nihility salience of a privileged, insecure native population if you brewed yourself a triple espresso, sat down and spent an entire sleepless night trying to come up with one.
It is striking that when, in what we are told is its moment of greatest demographic humiliation, the once-dominant class finds a target worthy of its rage, it turns out to be exactly the same one the long, sad history of European thought has prepared us to expect. There’s something practically medieval about parking blame for a supposed Islamic invasion at the feet of international Jewry — it has the feel, in point of fact, of some unprocessed psychic material left over from the time of the Crusades. And it might well have remained a fringe belief, except for the exceptionally good job it does in organizing and validating the feelings a great many people clearly already have in the early years of the twenty-first century.
That the theory of the Great Replacement has any adherents to speak of is already quite distressing enough. But the way it operates in the context of the Long Emergency is still more so. What unsettles so profoundly is one of the things that nativists permit themselves to believe when they adopt this narrative: that in preparing to repel (or really eliminate) the alien Other, they’re doing ecological work. Consciously or otherwise, their plan to repair the atmosphere, revive the world of the time before, and restore the correct and ordained order of things, is genocide.
§ Quite a word, that, isn’t it? We tend to recoil from it, or want to insist that any author using it must have lapsed into the lowest and most hyperbolic form of demagoguery. But what else can we call a state of affairs in which those with the power to do otherwise connive at the extinction of entire peoples? The English language doesn’t really offer another word that quite so accurately describes what is taking shape. One strategic foresight plan circulating among financial managers speaks plainly of the “shedding” of perhaps two to three billion lives in the global South over the next three decades, with much of the globe written off like a bad investment. And we know that documents like this, depicting the elimination of a third of the world’s population as a regrettable fait accompli, have a nasty way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies — for where’s the sense in mounting an effort to resist something that has already taken place? Complicity in such representations is genocidal in consequence, if not intent.
Europe, of course, has prior form in disposal of excess populations, and the large-scale engineering of what historian Achille Mbembe calls “deathworlds.” (It would, indeed, be hard to conjure a better illustration of Mbembe’s “necropolitics” than the specter of three billion mostly Black and brown people abandoned to their fates, by a managerial elite that evidently cannot be bothered to exert itself in their defense.) Nor would such an act be the first time genocidal action has had ecological consequence. It is now believed, for example, that the slaughter of some 56 million human beings in the course of the European colonization of the Americas entrained significant cooling of the northern latitudes at the cusp of the seventeenth century, as the tens of millions of hectares under Indigenous cultivation returned to forest. The drawdown of atmospheric carbon that resulted was of such scale and rapidity that it led to a new trough of starkly lower temperatures, even amid the multi-century cooling pattern known as the “Little Ice Age.” The terrifying prospect we face is that, instead of understanding this episode as a particularly grim illustration of humanity’s effect on the ecosphere, some might prefer to take it as a model.
This may well strike you as quite a lot of fuss to make over what is, after all, merely a body of rhetoric, or a leap beyond any conclusion justified by the available evidence. But we might want to remember that few acts of rhetorical production take place entirely in a vacuum. And this one certainly does not: on the contrary, it has a growing audience, whose members have been primed to interpret events in their daily lives as fulfillments of Camus’s prophecy, and act in defense of everything they perceive is in the process of being stolen from them. And if Great Replacement theory in its fullest elaboration is perhaps a little much for some, at least on their first exposure to it, there are any number of articulations of the same basic idea that offer a gentler gradient of approach, a smoother onramp. In his extensive body of work, for example, the influential British nature writer Paul Kingsnorth consistently defines “the people” whose culture is worth preserving in a sweeping act of constitutive exclusion that would rule out the absolute majority of the actually-existing Londoners I know, very much including myself and my partner. Kingsnorth’s writing is genteel enough to appear in The Guardian, but gestures toward a far darker tradition: accept his framing, and you’ve already accepted one of the basic premises of Great Replacement theory. The same can be said, with a vastly larger audience and therefore incomparably greater consequence, for the top-rated American television personality Tucker Carlson’s assertion that the Democratic Party aims to “replace the current electorate” with “third-world voters.”
Depictions like these cleave a fatal line through the heart of the world. On this side of the line stands everyone who counts; on that side, the outside, are all the lives that have been rendered, precisely as in the notorious Nazi formulation, unworthy of life, neither to be furnished with care nor grieved at their end. To the degree that it is sincere, anyway, a belief in the Great Replacement is a way of giving oneself permission to discount all of the lives that one chooses not to protect — to write the value of those lives down to zero, and ultimately to turn away from whatever suffering they experience. But when the Other is already, unaccountably, inside the wire, a physical, bodily manifestation of something with the power to overwhelm and undo everything that matters, some will take the fatal step further, and act in preemption of the threat.
Words inspire deeds, that is, just as Miłosz argued — both inspire them, and legitimate them retrospectively. This is how stochastic terrorism works. Acts of “lone wolf” violence in which the perpetrator explicitly invoked Great Replacement theory as a motivation include, as of this writing, the October 2018 murders at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA (11 victims); the March 2019 massacre of worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand (51 victims); an August 2019 rampage at a Walmart in El Paso, TX (23 victims); and the May 2022 slaughter of Black shoppers at a Buffalo, NY, supermarket (10 victims). And if there is anything we are safe in saying about such acts, it is that this list will grow, simply as a matter of raw actuarial probability.
Renaud Camus didn’t train or equip or even directly encourage these shooters, of course, any more than the theory of dialectical materialism on its own produced the Gulag, or Mein Kampf the Final Solution. A long chain of material circumstances, enabling conditions and affordances had to come into being and lock into place before these any of these things could happen. The doctrine alone is never sufficient. But it is necessary. It is the foundation upon which the architecture of atrocity is constructed, piece by piece. The steady seep of such a doctrine through society, in both its undiluted and what we might call its diffusion forms, is how the move toward something previously regarded as unthinkable acquires its aura of inevitability. Indeed, the perceptible formation of consensus around the inevitability of such an act is no small part of what brings its enabling conditions into being. And lest drawing the arc that connects nominally lone shooters to acts of literal genocide still seems to you like several steps beyond the pale, remember that some have consciously been building the case for a more active program of mass slaughter slowly and painstakingly, across decades.
§ An emergent ecological consciousness and fear of the dark Other have been intertwined in the Western imagination for a very long time, and have been articulated in print at least since 1916’s The Passing of the Great Race. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that environmentalist sensibilities and a professed concern for the consequences of overpopulation fused in an overtly racist hostility to immigration policy, and immigrants. The widely beloved environmental activist and writer Edward Abbey, for example, notoriously described immigration to the United States from Latin America as “the mass influx of even more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-genetically, impoverished people” who “come to stay and stay to multiply.” Earth First! cofounder and “deep ecologist” Dave Foreman similarly characterized the United States as “an overflow pond for reckless overbreeding in Central America and Mexico (and for the Philippines and Africa and…),” arguing that “[s]o long as we offer that overflow pond, there is less need to lower birth rates in those countries.”
In the name of the wild places of the American land mass, and all the wild things living in them, both Abbey and Foreman called for the immediate imposition of a harshly restrictive border policy. Foreman went further still, though, rejecting the practice of an environmentalism he identified with “the prevention and control of pollution for human health” in favor of a purified conservationism, dedicated to “the protection of wildlands and wildlife” for their own sake. This latter, nobler end required an absolute reduction in the numbers of humanity: in his book Man Swarm, Foreman argued that “we must bring our [global] population down to no more than two billion,” and if this stark reduction of the species required measures like cutting off food aid to famine-stricken regions of the global South and “just let[ting] nature seek its own balance,” then so be it. Whether this sort of outright eliminationism is where the logic of “deep ecology” was leading all along isn’t clear, though the frankly racist language used by both Abbey and Foreman certainly suggests something telling about the shape of their desires. And in any event, we can be sure that whoever it was that would need to go in order to make up the necessary numbers, it wasn’t going to be them or anyone resembling them.
But to flense out and lay bare the actual origins of this doctrine in its present form, we need to cast our gaze back a decade earlier still. To a first approximation, the roots of contemporary Great Replacement theory, along with all its overtly genocidal offshoots, can be found in Jean Raspail’s notorious novel of 1972, The Camp Of The Saints. In Raspail’s overwrought fantasy, the “numberless disinherited people of the South,” in taking flight from ecological catastrophe, swamp and overwhelm a European civilization long lost to decadence and declining vigor. Perhaps imagining himself a lighter of beacons, some lone sentry sounding his clarion call from the ramparts, Raspail is writing to warn his native-born white readership of the true dimensions of the threat from the teeming South. He does so in language and imagery so cartoonishly repulsive that even describing it as “racist” is to considerably understate the case. This is a work of naked, visceral, horrified fascination with, and loathing for, the Other.
The Camp Of The Saints is the story of a flotilla of clapped-out freighters making its way slowly from Calcutta to the shores of France, bearing a reeking human cargo numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Led by a charismatic giant known only as the “turd eater,” this vile multitude aims to claim for itself everything denied to it throughout all the long age of empire — all the bounty and comfort and other good things of life tauntingly dangled before their eyes by the Europeans who invented them, but which they are constitutionally incapable of producing for themselves.
Upon making landfall, the column descends on Paris, leaving squalor and wreckage in its wake, as similar tides of human misery wash up against the other citadels of the West. A “consulting sociologist” hired to advise the Mayor of New York City on possible responses to the crisis warns that there is to be no hope of escape from the invaders “‘unless you kill them all, that is, because you’ll never change them’”: “Black would be black, and white would be white…They were enemies on sight, and their hatred and scorn only grew as they came to know each other better.” But white has grown weary in the course of its long ascendance, even decadent — “The wolf is tired of being a wolf” — and in its weakness fails to mount an effective defense of its homeland. Worse: as the mob approaches, a deracinated, self-loathing European elite of philosophers, anarchists, renegade priests and sundry other fifth columnists conspires with a suddenly ascendant rabble of “Arabs and blacks, invisible somehow to the ostrich Parisians” to prepare the way for the dark invaders. (You thought I was kidding about the distinctly medieval tenor of Great Replacement rhetoric. As it turns out, though, Raspail does indeed nurture a dolchstosslegende with its roots in the Crusades, his contempt for the enemy within evidently having festered over all the time since “that day in 1522, the twelfth of October, when that noble knight Andrea d’Amaral, your patron saint, threw open the gates of Rhodes to the Turks.”)
Raspail’s novel ends as of course it must: in the craven Easter morning capitulation of the French government before the “dismal fauna of the Third World battalions,” followed swiftly by the collapse entire of Euro-American civilization, as its last redoubts are swarmed by the filthy, fast-breeding invaders from the South. It’s a speedrun of the Great Replacement, a recapitulation of immemorial white fears with one sweaty thumb mashed on the fast-forward. In depicting the encounter of North and South as a zero-sum clash of civilizations enacted at the sordid, intimate scale of bodies, The Camp Of The Saints steers its (presumptively white) reader toward only one possible conclusion: do unto others before they can do unto you.
Raspail’s novel is so clownish and so over the top in its racism that there was never any question of its appeal to a mainstream audience. In the years since its publication, however, there have been any number of attempts to lend preemptive violence in defense of Euro-American civilization the color of intellectual respectability. The first and most enduringly effective of these was ecologist Garrett Hardin’s essay “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping The Poor,” which appeared in the popular American magazine Psychology Today in September 1974. Hardin’s central conceit in this piece, which has since lent its name to an entire genre of right-ecological thought, is to depict the wealthy nations of the Earth as overladen lifeboats, foundering on a sea of chaos: “In the ocean outside each lifeboat swim the poor of the world, who would like to get in, or at least to share some of the wealth. What should the lifeboat passengers do?”
Hardin is coolly pseudorational where Raspail is never anything less than ridiculous, but the message is much the same. Tutting pompously that “the great majority of the governments in the world today…lack either the wisdom or the competence, or both” to manage their resources wisely, he frames large-scale famine in the global South as purely a failure of self-discipline. “Should those nations that do manage to put something aside be forced to come to the rescue each time an emergency occurs among the poor nations?” Hardin’s answer is naked: he opts, literally and in so many words, for “population control the crude way.” It is more moral to allow billions of human beings to starve to death, that is, rather than provide them with food aid, and all of this so they can learn their lesson, and manage their affairs like the wealthy and responsible nations of the global North. And this, in turn, is explicitly justified by the argument that it is necessary to preserve the natural environment so that the native-born European population may continue to enjoy its fruits of “clean beaches, unspoiled forests, and solitude.” Especially considering what is at stake in the topic under discussion, Hardin’s offhandedly patronizing tone is remarkable: in the aftermath of mass death, the poor nations “can learn from experience. They may mend their ways, and learn to budget for infrequent but certain emergencies.” The direct line of continuity between the oldest racist stereotypes, Hardin’s lecturing, and the more recent pseudoscientific discourse of “time preference” is obvious, but the argument is disingenuous in the extreme. It neatly sidesteps the fact that episodes of mass starvation used as a weapon against subject populations are nothing if not managed events, as in the Great Hunger visited on the Irish during 1845-’49, with its death toll in the seven figures, the Indian famine of 1876-’78, when 8.2 million people starved to death even as food was being exported to Britain, or the Holodomor (or “Terror-Famine”) imposed upon Ukraine in 1932-’33, which killed at least three and possibly as many as five million. In all of these cases, the suggestion that the victims could have avoided their fate had they only been more thrifty and careful in their stewardship of resources is nothing less than obscene.
For the most part, Hardin lacks Raspail’s unwholesome fascination with the Other’s shit and sweat and sex, but when he muses that the “freedom to breed is intolerable,” he leaves no doubt as to just whose breeding it is that weighs on his thoughts. “Lifeboat Ethics” is remarkably cavalier regarding the dispensability of the nonwhite Other, and remarkably precise as to which lives do and do not deserve to be mourned in their loss. Outside the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, indeed, the logic behind the engineering of deathworlds has rarely been made so shamelessly explicit: “Every one of the 15 million new lives added to India’s population [annually] puts an additional burden on the environment, and increases the economic and social costs of crowding…[E]very Indian life saved through medical or nutritional assistance from abroad diminishes the quality of life for those who remain, and for subsequent generations.” Well, there it is, sitting on the page as plain as day, just as Mbembe called it: an explicit act of rhetorical magick transforming the newly born to the already dead, the dead-in-temporary-abeyance. It is not the only thing clarified in the course of this brief essay. In less than 5,000 words, Hardin plainly states three things whose relevance will become increasingly clear as the Long Emergency unfolds: that even after Auschwitz and Nuremburg, public intellectuals in the North do not hesitate to reach for genocide as a tool of policy when it serves their interests; that what we would now think of as weaponized food insecurity is to be the means of accomplishing it; and that it is to be undertaken in defense of the ecosystem, so that favored populations may continue to enjoy it into an indefinite, white future.
If Great Replacement theory, or really the preexisting racisms of long standing to which it gives voice, specifies the victim for this titanic act of preemptive slaughter, Raspail the motive and Hardin the means, all that remains to be secured is the opportunity — the opening.
§ In 2008, the disaster sociologist Kathleen Tierney published an article in which she considered the lessons of Hurricane Katrina for the architects of public policy. The paper is never anything less than meticulous in its dissection of the failings of the official response, but one of its findings ran sharply counter to a narrative long established in our shared culture.
The finding in question had to do with the way ordinary people react to the onset of catastrophe. A century or more of depictions in the popular media, particularly, have left most of us with the distinct impression that when disaster strikes, our routine, even instinctual response is to panic, and this is true whether the disaster is natural or human in origin. We’re primed to expect scenes of mass looting, arson and the settling of scores amid the rubble, and above all throngs of people fleeing in utter mindless terror, trampling the weak beneath their feet in their desperation to escape. What Tierney found when she actually consulted the literature, though, was something quite different. After reviewing “[d]ecades of research” on disruptive events, she concluded that “panic on the part of the public is extremely rare in disasters of all types,” even in the aftermath of those particularly high-intensity events she categorized as “catastrophic,” like the September 11th attacks or Katrina itself. But in noting the “virtual absence of public panic…documented repeatedly in studies of all types of disasters,” Tierney drew an important distinction. The broader public, it is true, does not in general respond to catastrophic events by losing control. Instead, ordinary people tend to react much as you might hope, spontaneously displaying solidarity with other victims, and assisting in the rescue of neighbors even amid circumstances that continue to endanger them. But there is a segment of society that absolutely does lose it in such moments, and surrenders to the basest of impulses. That segment is the most privileged among us.
In her review of the disaster literature, Tierney identified a distinct syndrome of behavior that the bearers of privilege consistently displayed in emergent situations, characterized by “fear of social disorder; fear of poor, minorities, and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; willingness to resort to deadly force; and actions taken on the basis of rumor.” Following the sociologists Caron Chess and Lee Clarke, Tierney described this dynamic as “elite panic.” If American society had endured "an almost continuous state” of such panic since the attacks of September 2001, the phenomenon could most vividly be seen in the hours and days following Katrina’s landfall, where Rebecca Solnit tells us the tenor of the official “response shifted from rescue to control and worse.”
Though some measure of the violence that occurs in the aftermath of disaster may well consist of opportunists taking advantage of the chaos to settle personal scores, or live out fantasies of murder with impunity, that’s not really what shows up in the documented record of large-scale disaster. What does appear, routinely, is a kind of desperate, disproportionate rage, born of a sense that the general shuffling of the deck in the wake of disaster authorizes claims to equality that cannot and must not be allowed to assert themselves. And with the dreariest predictability, as Tierney suggests, this rage most often finds its target in the newcomer, the immigrant, the unassimilated or the one depicted as unassimilable. This maneuver allows the community to close ranks and define itself against what and who it is not, with more than occasionally lethal consequences for everyone who doesn’t make the cut. It is the revenge of the strong upon the weak.
This is not, of course, a new story. It’s familiar from every pogrom or act of reactionary violence that has ever followed in the wake of a disruptive event, from the slaughter of ethnic Koreans following the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 to the police execution of two Black men, and shooting of four others, at the Danziger Bridge in New Orleans six days after Katrina made landfall. The never-stated but self-evident purpose of this violence is to reassert control over a situation that already promises to upend the accustomed order — to seal off the opening that has appeared where there had been none hours or days before. And whatever terror the privileged may feel in these wide-open moments is real, if almost certainly pre-articulable as such. They know full well that their position is unjust, unjustifiable, and at risk in the jubilee they feel forming all around them. Fanon speaks of just this, in his psychoanalytic mode: when the tables start to turn, what the comfortable of the world fear will be done to them is no more than the very thing they have for so long gotten away with doing to others. And who knows better what that thing is than they themselves? “Elite panic” is, therefore, a theory of the opening. It describes the response of a privileged cohort, desperate to defend its prerogatives in a moment of rupture that might otherwise open onto new possibilities for the enactment of justice against them.
I believe we can read the politics of the global North since the lethal Mediterranean summer of 2015 as elite panic writ large. It’s all there, just as Tierney identified, right down to the touchy defensiveness of those who already lay hold over just about everything in the world worth having. Long Emergency furnishes the opening. From the perspective of elites, it is necessary above all to prevent anything else from exploiting that break, and establishing the conditions of justice.
§ Something dreadful lies in wait for us at the place where all of these threads converge, where the terror of nihility, Great Replacement theory and the observed propensity of elites to panic in the face of disaster fuse with the circumstances of global heating. What links them all is the concern for the bodies of the Other set to flight. This is the throughline, after all, that leads from Raspail to Hardin to Abbey and Foreman to Camus: the absolute dread that humanity might surge up from the South en masse, in the ultimate return of the repressed. Terror management theory suggests that under the right circumstances, many will interpret the appearance of the Other as a threat to their entire worldview, and therefore its ability to shield them against the terror of death. The doctrine of the Great Replacement goes further, priming its adherents to understand the mass population movements of the Long Emergency as deliberate and organized threats to their identity, with an identifiable set of authors. And the appearance of an opening ignites elite panic, loosing the revenge of those with the most to lose upon those with the least.
What seems clearer with every passing day is that by midcentury, we will all of us have to make our way together in those regions of the Earth that are still capable of sustaining human life, as a simple matter of pragmatic necessity, and this will be true whatever polities or cultures may have laid claim to these regions previously. We will, in fact, make liferafts of our cities, and it will be because we’ll have to. But given what we’ve seen, it’s hard to imagine any scenario more likely to trigger the terror of encroaching nihility, or activate racist fears of a Great Replacement, however ludicrous these may appear to those not caught up in their grasp. Given the racist cannot help but see in these faces on the beach the “vanguard of an antiworld bent on coming in the flesh to knock, at long last, at the gates of abundance,” and in every overloaded raft and washed-up trawler all Raspail’s purplest fears realized.
And this is so because Hardin’s nasty little essay has done its work. It has delivered its memetic payload, and that payload continues to propagate, conditioning thought and expression even in those who have never heard of “lifeboat politics.” Even now, it remains the template that all too many bring with them to the interpretation of events. Consider in this light the October 2022 comments of Josep Borrell Fontelles, both High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President of the EU Commission: “Europe is a garden…Most of the rest of the world is a jungle. And the jungle could invade the garden." This is a lifelong member of the PSOE, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, speaking — at least nominally a man of the left. In ungrounding moments of existential, it would seem that the wealthy and privileged lash out against those their guilt convinces them are hellbent on expropriating their wealth, almost independently of whatever nominal political affiliations they might profess. It is not difficult to see where this road is leading. It isn’t simply harsh immigration measures, restrictive border policies or deathworlds in miniature, each one the scale of an overloaded raft or refrigerated trailer stuffed with corpses. It is elimination. Every reinscription of Great Replacement theory takes us one step closer to the moment of its realization.
Understanding how this works as a theory of ecological action is key to reactionary activity in our epoch. For the most part, it is only in the United States and Brazil that climate denialism retains any particular purchase on the rightist imagination. Elsewhere, otherwise reactionary parties are generally pleased to present themselves as taking decisive action on what is, in most places on Earth, a matter of broad and shared public concern. And not infrequently, they win support to the degree that they are seen to do so, as Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National has in France, Viktor Orbán's Fidesz has in Hungary and Perussuomalaiset (the "True Finns Party") has in Finland. In taking the “soil” in the usual blood-and-soil formulation slightly more seriously than has generally been the case in the history of fascism, these parties are merely the latest of a long line to have articulated a brown/green fusion. And amid the conditions of the present moment, it’s a canny move: couple the promise of overcoming the self in the transcendent body of the People with I-speak-for-the-trees virtue, and one can easily see how a resurgent ecofascism might become irresistible.
To be sure, many on the right wear their ecological consciousness lightly, deploying it primarily in the hope that it might afford a means of access to audiences that would otherwise be put off by their extremism. But for others, the belief in nature as a pre-existing unity is entirely sincere. The tenets of such a belief were perfectly expressed in an April 2013 statement issued by the self-proclaimed “Green Wing” of the Greek Golden Dawn movement. “The leftists and the hippies tried to claim the ecologist movement as their own, but [our] love for nature is different than theirs: The environment is the cradle of our Race, it mirrors our culture and civilization, making it our duty to protect it.” By now, of course, we know just what that “protection” consists of. Is it really so strange to think, after all, that when fascists feel themselves called to the defense of that environment, they might do what fascists have always done without the slightest provocation?
I am, of course, wary of offering a totalizing, overly simplistic theory to account for any behavior as complex as right-wing violence. Again: none of this is meant to “explain” white grievance, or those analogous sentiments, like Hindutva, that prevail in regions of the world where the dominant population is not of European descent. What I have tried to do here is to sketch a theory of what happens when these preexisting currents intersect an authorizing body of rhetoric, a set of environmental triggers, and the enabling material conditions — for when they do, and an opening appears, the results will be unspeakable. I believe it is still possible to interrupt or short-circuit this process. If we want to do so, however — if we want to forestall the moment at which those fearful of losing their privilege tip over into regarding their neighbors and onetime friends as vectors of threat to their identity, and therefore as harbingers of nihility that must be erased, and to circumvent the rise of an explicitly eliminationist ecofascism more broadly — the essential thing is to create lifeworlds in which it is possible for all of us to experience safety and abundance within the larger enclosing context of threatened nihilation, without coming to regard those around us as Other. Our ability to create the enduring circumstances of life with justice requires that we use the opening afforded us by the Long Emergency to achieve something very different from anything the fascists imagine, or can imagine. We must salvage the makings of a lifeworld girded with care for one another, and develop a way of thinking about collective power that invites rather than excludes, now when we still enjoy some measure of the time, space and means necessary for us to assemble them.
[Chapter ends]
§ At the moment I'm reading one of the freshest, most genuinely innovative proposals for rethinking the way we approach healthcare-in-the-round that I've ever come across, Cassie Thornton’s The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-To-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future — brilliant, highly recommended; listening to a lot of Wagner, curiously enough; and still watching The Last of Us, though with a little more ambivalence every week.
Until next dispatch: take care of yourself and the ones who need you, and let yourself be taken care of. You have, as ever,
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 122 of Sunday, 12 March 2023, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊