When I enter René's house, this morning in December 2022, in the village of Beaucourt-en-Santerre, the temperature is much closer to 25 ° C than 19 ° C then recommended to “save energy”. René, retired from the public service, is one of these modern and powerful humans of the XXIe century.
He does not take the threat of the government at all seriously concerning the possibilities of rupture of electrical supply: “We have nuclear power plants anyway!” »»
During our exchange, René shows that he controls the temperature of his house: effortlessly, he rejects the assault on the cold which then reigns outside.
“I haven't worked all my life to freeze me at home,” he says sure of himself, the ecolos, all that, they annoy us “.
How to explain this inaction to say the least paradoxical? The thought of the philosopher Henri Lefebvre is enlightening. According to him, the human must experience a need to act, work and create. For him, the real need arises from an ordeal, from a problem that must necessarily be resolved, it would even be the only way to generate a voluntary human action.
This phenomenon could explain why it is so difficult to translate into acts
“The ecological emergency”. Can we speak “urgently” when there is not yet real ordeal?
A threat not pressing
The multiplication of violent storms, floods, the rise of the oceans, the melting of glaciers, droughts and fires, as real and tangible as they may have yet taken place on a large scale to mark the daily routines across an entire country.
The hypothesis is as follows: in Western countries, climatic hazards would not yet bring enough consequences for a need to act generalized.
In other words, the suffering caused by climate change may remain too distant, too localized or too sporadic. Barely we collectively feel discomfort in view of the convergence of continuous warnings of environmental activists and the litany of disasters on a planetary scale, but located on small perimeters.
In addition, for local and ephemeral damage, however strong they may be, Western countries are fairly equipped to remedy it economically and technically, rich enough so that they do not question the global socio-economic organization.
Like a flight forward, the exploitation of natural resources gives them, the ability to control the effects of natural disasters born from the exploitation of natural resources. To where?
Existential consumerism
Consequently, to evolve our Western way of life remains an unnamed option, especially since the latter is perceived as the most fundamental dimension, the deepest and characteristic accomplishment of Modern that we are.
This lifestyle covers with unprecedented effectiveness the most essential needs that humanity has always sought to fill: push the limits of death, diseases, lighten the physical burden of existence in the fight to satisfy our biological needs and protect us from a hostile environment, etc.
The search for material comfort is, in this completely existential. This existentialism is not ecological. The human needs are entirely turned towards production, achievement, acquisition of objects, the consumption of artifacts that release it. The source of this material prosperity being based on the exploitation of the living and mineral world, humans will procrastor as much as possible the change of balance of this relationship to the environment.
Faced with this existential necessity, to point responsibility and rationality by mobilizing scientific arguments has little effect. Especially when the calls are awkwardly worn. Some environmental or scientific activists are thus perceived as preachers, prospectivists or moralists.
It is that they have, in my opinion, not understood the anthropological primacy of the fight against the environment: our wicked lifestyle, although in an imperfect way, but more than ever in history, the basic needs of humans.
A fight lost in advance?
The risk is therefore that Modern Western are fighting as much as possible to maintain this lifestyle, until the resources are exhausted.
In view of the news since the election of Trump and the invasion of Ukraine, it is a safe bet that they will even teach the weakest humans to keep it, before fighting with each other. It is even possible that, to keep this privilege, they prefer to sacrifice the poorest humans.
Because this lifestyle represents the greatest emancipation towards death and pain never affected for such a large number of individuals, but also the greatest freedom obtained from the environment.
Continuous emancipation, although not completed, vis-à-vis what Marx called, “the reign of necessity”. And if, to paraphrase Marx, “a reign of necessity still remains”, a good part of the Westerners, even if they work, are “beyond this reign”. The reign of Moderns is very similar at this moment of the history of humanity to which Marx aspired where “begins the development of the powers of man, which is to himself his own end, which is the real reign of freedom”. A moment when working and consuming is no longer just reduced to satisfying biological needs, but to the development, to the well-being of the person.
The freedom and the comfort that releases time and the body are the most precious goods of the modern Western human (and all non-Western people who have become modern). It is possible that it is necessary to wait for the climatic threat to jeopardize this freedom in a palpable way so that it feels the need to defend it. Only then, he will be able to fully act to rebalance his relationship to the exploitation of the environment … if there is still time.
It is on this anthropological reality that the injunction to ecological action today, an injunction all the less effective as it is opposed to an essential quest for humanity since its appearance on earth.
In this context, should we think that the anthropological perspective is hopeless? No, since it, on the contrary, makes it possible to avoid the pitfall of naive militant injunctions, fake simplistic hopes, or even to counter the word of gurus. The challenge is to start from humans to initiate truly effective actions.
