Mission Undermined?

Arendt for the Anthropocene

One of the great motivations drawing me to Arendt for thinking about the Anthropocene is that she understands breaks in history. Whether she’s following her friend Walter Benjamin in his Theses, or worrying about the upending of the history of political thought, or lamenting the “rise of the social,” or warning the world about the new danger of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt is savvy to the problem of historical disruption, of things emerging that are genuinely new under the sun.

The Anthropocene is that kind of thing.

Arendt is also, especially in her work on The Human Condition, preoccupied with humanity as such. She’s not about human nature or about “natural law” or some “natural rights” that define, regulate, limit (control, manage?) human beings, as are other political thinkers. She’s exploring the conditions (I think they are like Kantian conditions of possibility) that are given to humans, that allow them to appear, at all, as such. What are the fundamental circumstances, given by earth (nature), given by the “world” (technical term, consisting of the places and things of human artifice), that form the reality in and by which humans come into the world, sojourn through it, and leave something behind so that their mortal lives are not entirely futile, managing merely to preserve the species, as do animals?

Along with the conditions of human life, Arendt gives attention to human activity, the vita activa, and to human thought, the vita contemplativa, bringing the two together and not separating them out into “those who do” and “those who think.” We must think what we are doing.

She gives attention also to place and to the worldly artifacts, institutions, conventions, and realms that provide “spaces of freedom.” Knowing that freedom requires more than mere liberation, more than revolution (violence, destruction), Arendt understands that places offer stability and security in order to have genuine freedom, both individually and collectively. How free are you if your life is fundamentally insecure? Arendt experienced placelessness and homelessness first hand.

---

What happens when you put the conditions, activities, and places together? What happens if a break in history is fundamentally dehumanizing, having completely disrupted these three? What if the Anthropocene (so-called, and for good reason!) has led to circumstances where humans have fundamentally escaped their earthly/worldly conditioning and their most basic activities of labor, work, and action, along with thought as we know it? What happens if humans have lost or even destroyed the private and public spaces provided for these activities? What if we’ve become no longer human in any recognizable fashion?

How is such a state of affairs even to be called the Anthropocene?

My stated mission of “trying to be a good human in the Anthropocene” might be totally undermined, if I take Arendt seriously.

This new age, understood via Arendt’s techne, may be the age of humans having escaped their humanity. However much sense the term Anthropocene makes on some level, clearly our species (whatever it now is) and our activities (whatever they now are) and our economic, social, and political spaces (such as they now are), have created planetary change at enormous scale and magnitude, beyond comprehension.

---

Already in the late 1950’s when Arendt was writing The Human Condition, reflecting on the rise of the tools and technologies (“instrumentality”) of the modern age, she worried about how human activities had already gone so far as, effectively, to reverse the fabrication process that had allowed humans to make a relatively isolated, artificial world within nature, but more or less “walled off” from it, a world highly useful for our own safety and purposes. Taking material from the world, “killing natural processes or interrupting or imitating them” — “decoupling” ourselves, as the Breakthrough people put it — homo faber used to keep its activities confined to labor and to work, world-making on a human scale. No longer.

As technology develops, humans start channeling natural processes into the human artifice and world. As technology develops even further, we can even channel it back out to the “household of nature” itself. No longer do the earth, and the world as we knew it from previous generations, give to and condition us. Whatever/whoever we’ve become, whatever it is we’re now doing, now we are the ones “giving” back and “conditioning” back to the earth itself, completely throwing over all prior contiguous worlds.

In one passage in particular from The Human Condition, where Arendt is discussing the “main stages of modern technology’s development since the beginning of the modern age” (HC p. 148-153), she steps through each, passing from the age of the steam engine, still relatively contiguous, then electricity, then automation (machine manufacturing), and finally the nascent atomic age. Referring to the transition from electricity to automation and machine manufacturing, Arendt says that we have begun to “create.”¹

Today we have begun to “create,” as it were, that is, to unchain natural processes of our own which would never have happened without us, and instead of carefully surrounding the human artifice with defenses against natural elementary forces, keeping them as far as possible outside the man-made world, we have channeled these forces, along with their elementary power, into the world itself. (148-149)

No more decoupling. At this stage, humans have unchained (from nature) and harnessed natural processes sufficiently to channel them into the world itself.

From this brave, new world, it becomes possible, next, to reach back out to effectively re-create earth and nature. The scale becomes planetary, even universal.

Instruments of nuclear technology… if released in sufficient and not even very great quantities, could destroy all organic life on earth, present sufficient evidence for the enormous scale on which such a change might take place. Here it would no longer be a question of unchaining and letting loose elementary natural processes, but of handling on the earth and in everyday life energies and forces such as occur only outside the earth, in the universe; this is already done, but only in the research laboratories of nuclear physicists. If present technology consists of channeling natural forces into the world of the human artifice, future technology may yet consist of channeling the universal forces of the cosmos around us into the nature of the earth. It remains to be seen whether these future techniques will transform the household of nature as we have known it since the beginning of our world to the same extent or even more than the present technology has changed the very worldliness of the human artifice. (149-150)

So present technologies, at the time of Arendt’s writing, at the earliest stage of the Great Acceleration, were channeling natural processes into the artificial human world — rather than, as of old, there being (tiny) human worlds carved out from nature, literally walled off places where humans could protect themselves from raw and dangerous untamed energies and forces. Present technologies, then, harnessed those forces and brought them into human worlds.

Future technologies, as Arendt foresaw, based on the nascent nuclear case, extending back out into nature, will work at enormous scale, affecting all organic life on earth. Foreshadowing such a future, mid-20th century physicists were capable in laboratories of “handling on the earth and in everyday life energies and forces such as occur only outside the earth, in the universe.” Arendt predicted that those “universal forces” may yet “be channeled into the nature of the earth” itself, transforming “the household of nature as we have known it.” We in the 21st century, given our vantage point 65 years on, can add to Arendt’s “universal” forces: climate change, mass extinction, reversals of glaciation and polar ice, sea level rise and ocean current reversal, re-jigging chemical and hydrological cycles, triggering seismic events² — as well as, of course, elementary physical particles unleashed, computer networks and algorithms autonomously surveillant and globally interlinked, and emergent AI. Nothing humans do is constrained any longer to laboratories, mines, farms, factories, cities, or any other geographic space remaining under close human scrutiny and management.

If the conditions of possibility of human life, throughout all history and pre-history, obliged us to labor, to work to fabricate limited artificial human worlds, to practice excellence and politics in a public realm, yet now we have fundamentally changed all those “givens,” are we even human anymore?

---

To be sure, it need not be a question of nature, of “technically” whether or not we are still human. But such fundamental change, on such enormous scale, does question whether anything as we know it makes sense any longer.

Basic life parameters set by earth, and set by a limited human-made world, into which we have always been born, have always conditioned us. But now we’re including literally everything within the realm of what we ourselves — now — create, ex nihilo as it were. Nothing is given. The only conditions left are those we create entirely anew.

It’s as if we were to occupy an alien planet and start over.

The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet. Such an event, no longer totally impossible, would imply that man would have to live under man-made conditions, radically different from those the earth offers him. Neither labor nor work nor action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer. Yet even these hypothetical wanderers from the earth would still be human; but the only statement we could make regarding their “nature” is that they still are conditioned beings, even though their condition is now self-made… (HC p. 10)

Humans will never escape being “conditioned beings” (as such), but all activity, all thought, all places, all actual conditions under which humans have ever lived, could utterly change — have, in the Anthropocene, utterly changed. “Neither labor nor work nor action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer.” No more earth, no more durable world of places and things, into which we are born to stabilize and secure worldly sojourns, no more continuity of history or thought, no more fabricated tools, tables, temples, walls to delimit and structure private and public realms, securing families and political collectives away from raw and dangerous nature. Not even art or poetry will there be in any recognizable fashion, to recount glorious or excellent or beautiful words and deeds of humans past who made their mark.

We don’t have to emigrate to some other planet to experience life as everything is “self-made.” We have already transformed our present planet, not quite to our specifications.

Technically, by “nature,” we are still human.

Technically, the earth, the world, the planet we have now wrought and “live” in, is still the earth, world, and planet that wrought us, that made us the beings we are.

But in Arendtian terms, does it even really make sense any more to ask about, to pose and ponder about, being good humans in this Anthropocene?

Singapore, Gardens by the Bay, Wikimedia Commons

1. Greek thought, in which Arendt was steeped, makes a distinction between “making” and “creating” (as in the Christian ex nihilo or “out of nothing,” referring to God’s creation of the world). Humans make out of existing material, upon which they impose their idea or form of what they want to create. It’s a destructive (violent) process. Trees must be cut down for wood, which can than be fashioned into a bed, a table, or a chair.

2. There is some new evidence of fracking and hydro activities causing anthropogenic earthquakes: Texas case. Vietnam.