Philosophy and Civilization: An Interview with Rupert Read, Spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion

Philosopher Rupert Read is active in the climate change movement Extinction Rebellion, and has recently released a new book about his work there. He took time to talk with us about his work for the movement, his philosophical writings, and the role philosophy should play in addressing the challenge of global warming.

As an advocate for Extinction Rebellion, you argue our current civilization is doomed. Explain that claim and how you defend it in your work.

When we think about impending climate breakdown, there are three broad possibilities of what this could mean for us:

• The first is terminal decline leading to complete and utter social collapse.
• The second is that we will manage to create a successor civilization to succeed the collapse of this one.
• The third is that we will get our act together in time to turn things around and prevent civilizational collapse.

There is not much to be said about scenario one, beyond the acknowledgement that it is about the worst possible outcome imaginable. I’ll come back to scenario two. While number three strikes me as by far least likely.

Why do I think that it is not possible to turn things around to preserve things roughly as they stand, and that even the third option just described is unlikely? Well it’s been clear for some time now that our economic, political and social systems are making our planet uninhabitable, and that successive governments have failed to address their ecology- and climate-wrecking effects. Despite scientific consensus for decades on the climate emergency, we are in the absurd situation now of living in a 1-degree warmed world, while hurtling towards a predicted 1.5-degrees or greater of warming maybe within the next 10 years or so; and likely between 3-5-degrees by the end of the century.

There is no ‘safe’ level of warming, ‘even’ 2-degrees means the death of over 99% of the world’s coral reefs – permanently defacing the ecology of our planet. The International Panel on Climate Change is unambiguous in its latest report that 2-degrees means the displacement of many millions of people through desertification and flooding. It means a greater frequency and a higher magnitude of the extreme weather events that are increasingly blighting the world. It means an increase in violence and war globally because of resource scarcity and hotter temperatures. It means increased frequency of pandemic and pestilence, with greater threats to our health and the food supply we rely upon to nourish us. And it likely means the eventual complete erasure of ice from both the North and South poles. These outcomes are simply not compatible with our civilization continuing. Add to them that I am very concerned about the possibility of some/ partial civilization collapse(s) before any of these, maybe through dire food shortages.

The 2015 Paris Accord, which is the international agreement touted as the most ‘successful’ attempt to-date at getting policy makers to face up to the climate emergency, is an entirely voluntary treaty with no enforcement mechanism whatsoever that relies upon conservative estimates of likely warming scenarios. Worse yet, the agreement counts upon the technophilic fantasy of widespread deployment of negative emissions technologies to effectively take global C02 emissions to below zero in the latter half of the century. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is the technology that is supposed to be able to take the lead on this. But there are currently only a handful of CCS plants, which collectively make a negligible impact in removing carbon from the atmosphere. These are technologies that simply do not exist to anywhere the scale needed to meet the Paris targets and it is unclear whether they ever will exist. We are relying on technologies that we have not yet even developed to solve problems that we know if left unchecked will cause widespread ecological and social collapse certainly within the century, and probably within the next few decades.

The trajectory that we are on does not leave any real room for optimism that we will keep below two degrees warming. Something necessary for our civilization to continue. Because of this we ought to consider how we can use the dying days of this civilization to create something more robust to climate breakdown, and that no longer feeds the flames of that breakdown. A lot of my recent work has involved advocating what the academic Jem Bendell calls ‘Deep adaptation’. This involves considering not just how we can mitigate environmental and ecological harms, but also how we can adapt as best we can to the harms that are already ‘locked in’. This strikes me as a much more honest approach to climate breakdown. Thus, the second scenario that I outlined is what we should prepare for. In practice deep adaptation means localizing much production and democratic control, while moving away from the hypermobile world of industrial growth capitalism. It means fundamentally reshaping society so that it is no longer recognizably our civilization. I hope we might be able to create something better.

Even if the third option is achieved, it will require transformative change to get there. Transformative Adaptation. We are nowhere near even considering this as a society, yet. I talk more on this subject (and more) in my new book with Samuel Alexander entitled, Extinction Rebellion: Insights from the Inside.

What areas of philosophy do you find most useful for making your argument? Are there any you believe hinder an appropriate understanding of the dilemma we currently face?

I spoke previously about the importance of deep adaptation, and how that framework can help us create a new civilization more robust to impending climate breakdown. There is a lot of philosophical work to be done in conceptualizing what a more resilient civilization looks like. Questions of how, and to what extent, we ought to localize production are key here. This might not sound like philosophy, but it is: it is about questioning for instance the assumption that cosmopolitan globalism is desirable. It’s about considering seriously the virtues of indigenous wisdom.

Consider questions too of how we preserve the most attractive elements of our current civilization. There are elements of intercultural exchange that globalization has facilitated that are worth preserving. And political and civil liberties. An important philosophical task going forward will be envisaging and articulating a plan for deep adaptation that doesn’t turn its back on these unless there is no alternative. This is a profoundly philosophical investigation into what we value and how to square those values with ecological reality.

In addition to this, we need to challenge and overhaul dominant ideologies that have facilitated our civilization’s terminal decline. Some of these are familiar targets: i.e our relationship toward consumption and materialism.

However, clearly these consumerist and consumptive behavior patterns don’t appear out of nowhere. Consider how almost every government in the world prioritizes economic growth as its key policy objective. Ecologists have, for a long time, pointed out that the pursuit of endless economic growth is incompatible with the finitude of our planet. Thus, the system of industrialized growth capitalism is simply incompatible with maintaining a habitable planet. We need therefore to do philosophical work in challenging the ideology of growthism.

When confronted with the ecological realities of our economic activity, many people presume that new technologies will play a near-messianic role in fixing our ecological predicament. Increasingly absurd fantasies abound from both left and right wing commentators. I lack the space to go into depth here, but quite frankly this is a recklessly inadequate survival strategy. Even if technology might play a big role here, is it worth staking our planetary survival on the hope that we invent something truly unprecedented? I think not. Thus, another ideology that needs challenging is our technophilia.

Philosophy is useful for interrogating these value systems and shedding light on the extent to which they are driving climate and ecological collapse. If we are going to avoid terminal ecological decline, then we will need to disavow some of these pervasive and unquestionable ideologies.

So. It’s a matter of achieving freedom from inherited ideologies. The kind of freedom, liberation, that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is designed to make possible. It is about interrogating (and reworking) assumptions such as ‘progress’. It’s about thinking deeply about what matters to us. It’s about negotiating a crisis of meaning that for most people is only just beginning.

The argument for a radical shift in how humans live is informed by ideas about what a human is and our relationship to nature. Historically, these are contested concepts. How do you understand them?

What is nature? Two possibilities: nature as including us and nature as opposed to us. Two different senses of nature, two different things we could mean by nature. Nature as including us, nature is all-encompassing; or nature as opposed to us, nature is what we are not. Now what philosophers normally do in my opinion and experience, is they try to plump for one or the other of these they try to suggest that really nature should be thought of as everything and therefore as including us or that really nature should be opposed to us and we should be thought of as set apart from nature.

I would argue that we need both, that we need both senses of ‘nature’. I would argue that is no accident that this concept (nature) is endlessly contested. I would argue that we need both senses of this concept of nature in order to do justice to it, in order to do justice to ourselves: as beings that are of course fully biological and ecological (and we forget that at our terrible cost) — but as beings that also need to notice that (we do so forget), and that are capable of doing damage to the rest of the web of life in a way incapable for other beings which do not have a sense of themselves as separate. Ironically, in order to preserve the rest of…nature adequately, we have to recall our sense of separation from it. If we don’t do this, then we covertly think of ourselves as entitled to do whatever the hell we like: because whatever we do is ‘natural’. And then we create a living/dying Hell.

Your earlier works are on Wittgenstein. Are there any insights from those works that influenced your current work?

In Culture and Value Wittgenstein wrote: ‘Our civilization is characterized by the word ‘progress’. Progress is its form rather than making progress one of its features. Typically, it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure’. This quote has stuck with me ever since I encountered it as a PhD student. Wittgenstein was a great critic of the ideologies of scientism and ‘progress’ and was effective in shining in a light on just how endemic they are. As we previously discussed, there is a great deal of obfuscation in our culture’s values. Often these values masquerade as simply objective matters of fact. Wittgenstein’s work is liberatory in helping us identify dangerous ideological commitments that hide behind a veneer of ‘objectivity’ and inevitability.

Take, for example, the idea of ‘progress’ within our culture. ‘You can’t stop progress’ is a phrase often bandied about. To me, this highlights a profound lack of awareness and a lack of steering of the direction that our civilization has taken. ‘Progress’ is often conceptualized as taking the form of increased material consumption and technological innovation. Yet, once we interrogate this trajectory, we often find that many such ‘innovations’ don’t really benefit the vast amount of people, and indeed are at root destroying our shared planetary home. The idea of progress has become decoupled from any meaningful benefit to humanity. Now obviously I am speaking here in generalities. Modern technology has brought many benefits. But a selective and cautious approach to the adoption of new technologies would serve humanity far better than the laissez-faire approach that dominates.

The influential 20^th Century political philosopher Hannah Arendt saw this very clearly. My work on the Precautionary Principle, which I believe is an essential tool for our times, aims to expound it. Often described using proverbs such as ‘look before you leap’, at its heart, it is a safety net in an uncertain and often precarious world.

While many philosophers volunteer for or speak about issues they research, your activism seems to more central to your everyday work than the average scholar. How do you relate your activism to your other professional obligations?

Well there are points of intersection between my work as an professor of philosophy and my campaigning. Roughly, my activism has been informed by my research, and my research by my activism. Nevertheless, and despite some right-wing caricatures to the contrary, UK Universities are not particularly radical institutions! This is especially the case when it comes to thinking about climate breakdown.

Universities do not deny the seriousness of anthropogenic dangerous climate change directly, but they are often complicit through its near-absence across much of the curriculum. This is partly born of a fear of politicizing the problem. Yet unless we are willing to address the profoundly political questions raised by dangerous anthropogenic climate change, then we have no hope of avoiding worst-case scenarios and adapting to already locked-in harms.

In particular, there is an almost total avoidance of realism about climate breakdown and the risk of eco-driven societal collapse, in our universities. This is pathological.

I have tried to use my position to make sure that climate breakdown plays a big role in the philosophy programs that UEA offers. I am lucky to have several other colleagues who are deeply involved in green campaigning and politics. Nevertheless, the sad fact is that climate breakdown does not feature prominently or even at all on many courses. When this is the case, universities fail to offer a proper education to their students. Climate breakdown and eco-precariousness should be the lens through which most courses are taught. After all, the effects of these will invariably shape the world that our graduates will inherit. And may end it.

What steps do you encourage your readers or listeners to take for the betterment of humanity’s future?

The most important thing that you can do is get involved in organized resistance to our economic and political systems. What we do collectively is far more important than what we do individually. I would urge your readers to get involved in mass civil disobedience campaigns, such as those organized by Extinction Rebellion or the School Strike for Climate. You can find out more about XR and how it began by reading my new book.

If you are an academic philosopher, your place at this desperate moment in history is in attempting to be an organic intellectual with movements such as these. That is what I’ve been doing. And I wish there were more of us!

Rupert Read

Rupert Read is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, a campaigner for the Green Party of England and Wales and a frequent spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion. His academic interests include Ecological and Political Philosophy (including critiques of Rawlsian liberalism and work on the Precautionary Principle) and Philosophy of Language (with special focus on Wittgenstein). He is also the author of Philosophy for Life: Applying Philosophy in Politics and Culture and co-author, with Samuel Alexander, of This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the End of Empire — and What Lies Beyond.