Semiosis and the supposed superiority of ‘man’

Climate science leaves little doubt that humans have made the Earth an inhospitable place for life to flourish. The latest, and most urgent, report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that we have about twelve years to make radical changes to our carbon-emitting ways, or disaster awaits (Watts, 2018). The US National Climate Assessment, a project of thirteen Federal departments and agencies, reports that the country faces imminent risks from rising sea levels, wildfires, drought, floods, atmospheric warming, and a weakening of its ecosystems’ ability to absorb carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases (U. S. Global Change Research Program, 2018). Ninety-seven percent of scientists say humans are responsible for global warming and we must radically change our behavior to save the planet’s biosphere, ecosystems, and inhabitants (Marlon et al., 2018).

The globe boasts a spirited and growing green youth movement protesting political inaction over the eco-crisis (Wearden & Carrington, 2019). A generation born in an era of peak disaster from global warming will not tolerate the craven politics of world leaders beholden to barons of industry and finance, fossil-fuel giants, and technology moguls.

Tens of thousands of Western European school pupils went on strike in the winter of 2019 with the slogans #FridaysForFuture and ‘There’s no Planet B’ (“Children’s Climate,” 2019). Hence also women deciding to #BirthStrike because they feel unable to guarantee climate security to future generations (Doherty, 2019), and the efforts of Extinction Rebellion (https://rebellion.earth).

Their task is huge – UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warns that the political will to combat climate change is ‘fading’ (quoted in “Political Will,” 2019). Public support for action to stem our eco-crisis remains a work in progress, building slowly as people come to grasp the urgency of a planetary problem. But there are signs of a new citizenry ready to act on their environmental commitments. Nature and the British Medical Journal alike drew inspiration from #FridaysForFuture (Fisher, 2019; Stott et al., 2019).

Like scientists in general, climate scholars emphasize the need for patience in undertaking and understanding their work, which relies on the steady accumulation of data. Climate is history: the average of weather (Chakrabarty, 2014). These researchers face a special difficulty: the willful distortion of climate science by the bourgeois Anglo media. Corporate and state polluters and their acolytes in strategic communications and pseudo-academia feast on mundane but sensible scholarly disagreements among climate experts, which are mendaciously misconstrued as evidence that climate change is an invention (Lewandowsky et al., 2015; Maxwell & Miller, 2016). Public discourse is dominated by such coin-operated ideologues, while climate-change scientists struggle to be heard.

How did we arrive at this state of affairs? Bruno Latour proposes that ‘it is as though a significant segment of the ruling classes … had concluded that the earth no longer had room for them and for everyone else’ (2018: 15–16). But that way of thinking has a longer history than his otherwise correct analysis might suggest.

A complex heritage underpins worldviews that focus on the interests of human beings (anthropocentrism) versus the planet as a whole (eco-centrism). Thomas Hobbes argued that as part of ‘the war of all against all’, it is right for people to domesticate or destroy nature (1998, pp. 105–106), their brute state legitimized via the physiocratic transformation or destruction of subjects and objects. For Bacon, ‘commerce between the mind of man and the nature of things … is more precious than anything on earth’ (1620). Descartes maintained that ‘reason or good sense … exists whole and complete in each of us, … the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the lower animals’ (2007, p. 1). Kant deemed humans uniquely important: ‘through rank and dignity’ they were ‘an entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes’ (2006, p. 15).

A century later, Hegel celebrated human mastery of nature; a place or object ‘becomes mine’ because I can put my ‘will into everything’. People are purportedly unique in their desire and capacity to conserve objects and represent them via semiosis, and such willpower was independent of simple survival. It set humanity apart from other living things. As per Kant, the capacity to transcend ‘spontaneity and natural constitution’ supposedly distinguished us from other animals. Semiotic abilities legitimized the destructive use of power; Hegel termed this ‘the right of absolute proprietorship’. The corollary of this right was that ‘unused land cannot be guaranteed’. The necessary relationship between people and nature asserted itself at the core of human consciousness as a struggle to achieve freedom from risk and want (Hegel, 1954, pp. 242–243, 248–250). These thinkers reasoned that because people are unique in their desire and capacity to conserve objects and represent them via semiosis, a strange dialectical process affords humanity a special right of destruction. Willpower is independent of simple survival, and sets humanity apart from other living things.

When semiotic abilities were mobilized by civilizations intent on transformation rather than stasis, they licensed colonial and imperial adventurism over indigenous rights: ‘sacred respect for … unused land cannot be guaranteed’, argued Hegel. Nature’s ‘tedious chronicle’, where there is ‘nothing new under the sun’, is rightly and righteously disrespected and disobeyed by colonialism’s drive towards progress (Hegel, 1988, p. 50, 154, 61).

Only by understanding that tradition can we combat it – so powerful and profound are its sinews within dominant Western thought. It is as powerful in economics as it is the touching faith in technological fixes for everything. It is often contested, most notably by indigenous cosmology – but it is resilient and seemingly ever-present.