Petri Lahtinen
The “newly” broken out war in Ukraine has shown not only to the world at large but especially to Europe that there are still old-fashioned governments in existence that rely on the war machine and violence. At the same time, the conflict has shaken up people by exposing Europe’s crippling dependency on Russian oil and natural gas. Not that the masses would have come to realize the impermanence of fossil fuels but rather the price of food and petrol is climbing up to a level that breaks the pain barrier of the so-called “ordinary citizen”. The phenomenon reveals the general apathy and the limitedness of the current political systems. It now seems ironic that while the Russian company Nord Stream was planning new gas pipes in the Baltic Sea, various European politicians did not view the project as an issue of security policy but instead as something that would create a common interest that is mutual dependence between Russia and Europe. Statements of this sort were obviously ironic already back then since Russia was using the discontinuation of gas delivery as a method of blackmailing the purchasing countries such as Ukraine at the time. Yet, it is a ridiculous idea that purchasing gas from Russia could have ever been something that creates mutual dependence. As the war in Ukraine has demonstrated, the discontinuation of purchasing energy from Russia is one economic sanction that the West could utilize to press Russia to stop its war of aggression in Ukraine. However, it is has become painfully obvious that while energy sales are concerned, the relationship of dependence is not mutual but one-sided: despite the economic sanctions Russia continues its war while the European Union’s dependency on Russian energy has proven to have been chilling.
One would be gravely mistaken to think that the current energy crisis and the looming catastrophe would be limited solely to the prices at gas stations and grocery stores. In truth, the phenomenon in question is much wider and it penetrates the whole Western culture. Take food production for example: industrial agriculture has switched over to using commercial fertilizers to a large extent. For the most part, these are nitrogen fertilizers in which one of the key constituents is hydrogen. As for hydrogen, it is obtained from natural gas and therefore countries such as Finland and Estonia for example are dependent on Russian natural gas when it comes to agriculture. Going even further, we can see that most of the current wage labour is essentially linked to material consumption that, in turn, is a substantial building block of our individual identity. We live in an opportunist consumer society during an era of aggressive late capitalism where every demand is being met by producing any commodity desired by the consumer to the market, usually as a mass-production item. The key constituent in most of these mass-produced articles is plastic – a product of fossil fuels. These plastic mass-production items are clean, easy and maintenance-free. Plastic items are not being repaired since they are replaceable by an identical copy. This brutal facelessness and ahistorical character depict perfectly our comprehensive alienation from the resources of our material reality and the consumption of energy.
How can we explain the economic-political short-sightedness, the inability to recognize the one-way nature of our energy dependency and the alienation from the experience of energy on an individual level? Here, psychoanalysis provides us with useful concepts. Sigmund Freud used the term die Isolierung (isolation) meaning a subtype of denial in which the thing denied is expressed in such a way that the pronouncement does not have any real consequences that admitted facts usually have. The aforementioned statements about natural gas purchases not being an issue of security policy can be understood as isolation of this sort similar to governments joining a military alliance where one of its member countries is planning on destroying an ethnic minority for example. The individual’s deficient experience of energy, in turn, can be approached with the term die Verfremdung (alienation). Alienation often goes hand in hand with indifference as people might be aware of the consequences of their actions but are not letting them affect their choices. Ecological action is a good example of this: an individual might acknowledge that one’s consumption is damaging to the environment, but one still does not change one’s behaviour. The individual separates oneself as a small and insignificant agent from a problem that is experienced as insurmountable and viewed ultimately as solely structural and systematic. This problem is arguably something deeply rooted in the subconscious of the masses, and it is experienced as a rather sensitive issue when it does surface. We can think of movements such Extinction Rebellion that puts pressure on policymakers to pursue more ecological politics and economics while avoiding blaming or shaming individuals living in the toxic system. Nevertheless, often during the non-violent demonstrations organized by Extinction Rebellion there are aggressive individuals or even groups showing up to harass the protestors. The critique of current environmental movements hurts and gets under the skin since they question and challenge our way of life and living standards that we viewed as both rightfully inherited and earned.
When approaching the problems of energy consumption, it is important to understand what energy is in the first place. Vaclac Smil has suggested “the ability to transform a system” as a definition of energy. Further, philosopher Richard Beardsworth has claimed that the only meaningful way to approach energy is through phenomenology since energy manifests only in the transformations and effects caused by it. Energy itself remains an unknown variable and universal abstraction on the other hand. The 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer already viewed energy to experience, meaning, life and will: energy is not something strange to a human since whatever humans are, they are also partially energy and thus can experience it. Therefore, energy is force required for changes. It will always be an indelible part of all organic life and thus human life without energy is impossibility. It is then no surprise that energy, its various forms and the discovery and utilization of them have played a major role in the history of human culture.
It was not, however, until the discovery of fossil fuels and harnessing their power that transformed the whole human experience in unparalleled way in the 20th century. Fossil fuels enabled a six- to seventeen-fold increase in energy consumption, an explosive population growth via industrial food production and both common and deeply rooted belief in material growth. Oil was available more and more all the time and thus people grew confident that there was no need to be concerned about the availability of energy. Confidence in oil made new sort of computationalism possible that was detached from the issue of regeneration of natural resources. Fossil fuels have led – to borrow a term from philosopher Ernst Jünger – to the total mobilization of society where economic totalitarianism i.e. productivism pursues to harness everything material – and immaterial as well nowadays – for motion and profit. This is possible only when the world is understood primarily as resources and raw materials. The term ‘resource’ in itself can be used as a concept that aids the understanding and processing of the world. However, in a productivist society the concept of a resource is one-dimensional and leans heavily on a linear way of thinking in which the world is split up and separated into seemingly easy-to-manage pieces. From an energy-perspective fossil fuels are viewed easily as a primarily utilizable resource. This happens when energy is approached as a universal phenomenon behind matter and matter ends up being viewed as the source of energy.
When solving the energy crisis, the problem is not limited solely to the economic and political structures and deeply rooted capitalist culture of growth and consumption. In addition, in the Western world there prevails almost a blind scientism and technological determinism; many seem to be confident that the human inventiveness and resourcefulness will solve the so-called side consequences related to energy, consumption and material growth. This kind of reasoning is, however, unfounded since it overlooks the intricate material and ecological requirements of life and culture. To overcome the current energy crisis and to avoid it growing into a catastrophe we must aim at thorough change in attitudes and world-views. Furthermore, we must also develop the human thinking and imagination. These are important prerequisites for comprehensive changes in politics and economics.
So, regarding energy we are facing the challenge of changing economic and political structures on the one hand and developing the human thinking on the other hand. On a social level a significant reduction of the consumption of energy is required as well as time to develop sustainable solutions to replace the current practices, structures and systems. The opposition of change in the current infrastructure and the inertia of our inherited situation narrow the possibilities for a different sort of reality; alternatives become sensible only in a different kind of production and consumption environment. It is necessary to change the presumptions that govern economic activity in order to adapt to scarcer life. According to philosopher Ville Lähde these presumptions include a narrow concept of resources, perceiving the rest of environment as a “black box” (nature realized as an economic factor only as narrowly understood resources), the dogma of nature’s inexhaustibility and substitutability, the natural law of technological progress and the market as an automaton of inventiveness, the technocratic conception of science, a self-oriented and independent consumer and the commensurability of information coming to the market. What then are the necessary changes required to reduce both energy and general consumption and to adjust to a scarcer world? First of all, the concentration of wealth enabled by growth and false abundance, and inequality born out of it should be abandoned. The redistribution of wealth is no longer enough but instead global adjustment to scarcity is required. Obviously, this leads to a partial abandonment of the current living standards in wealthier countries. Second, there must be a breakage between economics and politics. Politics should be more in control of economics – rather than the other way around – and the general obsession over (endless) growth must be dismantled: the economics in the world of scarcity is characterized by degrowth. Likewise, science and technology must adopt themselves to the current situation and start serving life instead of being subjugated to politics and economics. While developing science and its prerequisites it must be taken into consideration, in what kind of world and what for science is being practiced and technology created.
To overcome productivism, philosopher Albert Borgmann has suggested the acts of focusing. These are practices that gather together the human existence at some phenomenon that requires and develops skills, traditions and sociability. The precondition of this focality is the transcendental presence of traditions and objects that, in turn, demand focusing, commitment, dedication and skill – all that together help the human being to grow as a whole. Taken even further, focality understood as self-guidance of comprehensible whole must be connected with incommensurability and heterogeneity that does not attempt to focus or remain pure. This internally incommensurable and meaning-sovereign multifocality philosophers Antti Salminen and Tere Váden have coined as a forest of foci. “Experientially, it means commitment and embodiment that already in itself contains, multiplies, and evolves focal practices and their values”. The plurality and serialism of time are also an essential part of a forest of foci. This approach offers ways of being and negotiating with natural entities in a meaningful, experimental and trying fashion. The nuance of the sacred can also be perceived in a forest of foci since the sacred already carries a forest of foci in it: sanctification as an act where the banal is separated from the sacred multiplies the field of a forest of foci.
In the pursuit of a scarcer world, universal basic income advocated by Global Visions can be viewed as a significant tool: sufficient basic income would enable refusal from certain wage labour that aids the crisis of the most low-income industries. In the place of these jobs basic income would pave the way for collectively good work that is based on mutual help, ecological solutions and reduction of consumption that is harmful to the environment. The greatest obstacle for liberation, however, is the individual’s ego. Disengagement from hierarchical “axioms” (such as the obsession over wage labour) and the implementation of non-expansionary energy require time and skills as well as the recognition of the consequences of actions, sympathy and overall living as a participant in regional whole. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels once wrote that the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains and the world to win. The stakes have been raised in the face of fossil fuels and ecological crises: the current and future generations have alongside with their chains the whole world to lose but also to win if we act now. To challenge current systems and developments it requires rebelliousness that takes, among other things, meaningful work and connection with both nature and community living with nature as its point of departure. This spirit of rebellion takes a doubtful and negative stand on expansionist tendencies of different centres, especially on the idea of endless growth and unified monoculture. To avoid violent totalitarianism that denies the diversity of life, the spirit of rebellion must include solidarity that is open to a global and peaceful cooperation that spans over language and cultural boundaries.
Sources
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http://tekhnema.free.fr/5editorial.html
Borgmann, Albert: Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1984.
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Marx, Karl & Engels, Friedrich: The Communist Manifesto. First published in 1848. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf
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Principles and values of Extinction Rebellion
https://rebellion.global/about-us/
Russia’s war on Ukraine: EU food policy implications
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2022/729368/EPRS_ATA(2022)729368_EN.pdf
