In the Heat of the Moment
Why climate research needs (no) Voldemort
There are moments of deep amazement – which are not infrequently accompanied by great laughter. As in the moment when Sam Vaknin said in our conversation with the utmost seriousness that he was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and the line from Macbeth immediately popped into my head: Fair is foul and foul is fear.1 Not infrequently, it’s turned out that the laughter is merely the expression of an insight that’s long been at work under the surface. Skepticism has been (for many, many years now) a silent companion of thought, a second other that encourages subjecting every form of sham evidence to an intellectual acid bath – often leading me to sentences and formulations in which the beautiful, the true and the good dissolve into simulation, no, even more: into their unrecognizability.
Where everything can be had at below cost, the epistemic is hijacked by bullshit; the aesthetic is overwhelmed by social kitsch, and morality by what is called moral grandstanding: Virtue Swagger.2
With fair is, and foul is fair, what Habermas once called the 'new obscurity' has become an everyday experience. Consequently, this mental double exposure is almost indispensable. But conversely, it may also seem as if circumstantial obscurity leads contemporaries to reassuring themselves of their integrity through virtue signaling – not infrequently confusing the categories. In any case, in some of the intellectual transmutations of the present, there appears an abysmalness observable in its purest form only in the work of Carl Schmitt, the theorist whose thought can be understood most precisely as a form of philosophical Breaking Bad.
The enemy is our question in form.
If Schmitt has turned this formula into a political program, it means: the enemy is the one I must split off to avoid asking myself the real question. Strictly speaking, it’s a form of psychic expatriation where a vagrantly placeless feeling of alienation is delegated to the Other. But, insofar as the Other takes over the negative self-image, nothing stands in the way of feeling good about ourselves, indeed of our self-glorification: Virtue Swagger. If a lucid mind like Bruno Latour resorted to invoking Carl Schmitt in his Gifford Lectures (not to mention the Climate Emergency Fund activists who've written Schmitt's sovereignty formula on their banner: How to Lead the Public into Emergency Mode), this only testifies to the incredible seductive power of Schmitt's self-empowerment formula.
That Power is a Drug is nothing new. Much more disturbing is when the starting point is actually an experience of powerlessness. Here the question arises: How big is the vacuum when self-assurance requires an outsourced arch-villain – and even more so when what the latter denies takes place in a cloudy, uncertain future?
That heaven – more precisely: the contemporary climate debate – has become a symbolic war zone is by no means accidental. Just as the Middle Ages fought out their conflicts on the transubstantiation doctrine of Christ; the gender of the angels; and the sweeping fire;3 the removal of realms of reality from all direct experience makes a suitable battle zone. Because the argument is one-sided, there is no judge on this side; apocalyptic thinking can mix with political theology and generate that spiritual fire from which contemporary culture wars are fed. Policy scholar Roger Pielke Jr. (with whom we’ve had a most stimulating conversation soon to be posted), shares on his Substack blog, The Honest Broker, an account of his personal experience with this cultural war in a short podcast: How I Became Voldemort in Climate Science.
If you follow his story, you’ll become caught up in a seemingly absurd yet highly disturbing debate in which a small band of climate activists sought out and fiercely attacked a respectable, much-quoted scientist in the strongest possible terms. The ostracism was preceded by a smear campaign, most notably by Joe Romm, a Center for American Progress representative, who, with the zeal of a crusader (an activist), took great pains attempting to damage his opponent's reputation. The absurd climax of this confrontation was Romm's refusal of his adversary's offer to engage in a public debate in his hometown – with the ingenious remark he didn't want to offer his opponent a platform4 – but this didn't stop him from attacking his espoused enemy with well over a hundred texts and a never-ending suada of insults (serial liar).
The decisive question, of course, is: Why does such a debate need a Voldemort? That is, a figure that may not be mentioned (He Who Must Not Be Named) but determines an individual's own thinking in the sense of having a negative mimesis. If we follow Schmittian thinking, the answer is of disarming simplicity. An enemy is needed because he, as the climate denier, takes on the role of a diabolon – and because the presence of such an antipode can be transformed into a form of belonging and political influence.5 In this context, the antipode (an external, expatriated enemy) is strategically important. On the one hand, its very existence explains why one’s plans have not yet been able to be translated into reality; on the other hand, it reinforces (especially if one can conjecture a plot behind it) the urgency of the apocalyptic message – and this, in turn, prompts the undecided to close ranks. Ultimately, one falls under the spell of Schmittian decisionism in an understanding of politics that has politics begin with the divorce of friend and foe. Consequently, Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz write in their memorandum:
The ecological class, engaged in a struggle with the old key classes, thus recognizes the right to define soil, territory, land, nation, people, bond, tradition, restriction, frontier in its own terms and in its own way, and to decide for itself what is "progressive" and what is not.6
But because this concept of politics is utopian per se, you have to cling to its enemy – while doing everything you can not to offer this Voldemort a platform to respond from. When the silencing of the denier becomes the driving force of your speech, you find yourself in a hall of mirrors – and that, in turn, means that you have sacrificed the thing supposedly at stake to an Identitarian phantasm, a notion of purity, or an article of faith. It is not by chance that the price – and Pielke points this out as the assigned task of his Honest Broker – is exchanging the scientific ethos (and its inherent modesty) for a form of political theology — thus destroying what can be and is, after all, the legitimacy of science alone: The willingness to be constantly taught better.
This is precisely where our personal disbelief comes in. Just as the medieval disputes about faith were ignited by an intellectual alien body (the unfolding Capitalist logic), the contemporary climate debate seems to be deeply escapist: an intellectual suicide mission that primarily serves the purpose of not having to deal with a complex world's impositions. The fatal consequences of this become apparent when you see many practical solution options don't appear in the discourses – if not wholly generally unknown in the first place (like the fact that 30% of CO2 emissions are due to concrete production).
The most striking expression of the zealots' forgetfulness of the present is their lacking awareness of the underlying epistemological structures. That the Club of Rome, as well as Dennis Meadows Limits to Growth7 go back to Jay Forrester's computer simulations – indeed, the latter (which were based on just five variables) didn’t exactly grace modeling – is as little known as even realizing such a program can’t be anything more than an extrapolation of present knowledge, a strategy game, if you will. If we’d taken seriously the predictions that Meadows ignited with his "pocketbook-sized bomb" (as a newspaper headlined at the time), we would have had to resort to state authoritarianism to avert disaster – something that’s once again occupying the minds of some activists in their apocalyptic scenarios of the present. What people forget about is that (as the creator of simulation technology, Jay Forrester, never tired of pointing out), in the end, there is still a human factor involved. If we remember this perspective, we also remember we aren't dealing with science in computer models but with a discipline that demonstrates its fallibility to its practitioners – its experts. Does this mean that you should put your hands complacently in your lap? No. But it does mean you should beware of trying to prop up your worldview with a Voldemort.
It is noteworthy that this line is anticipated in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene of 1590: Then faire grew foule, and foule grew faire in sight – suggesting that one is dealing with a thoroughly common sense of time.
Burckhardt, M. – Schein und Wahn [Appearance and Delusion]. In: Lettre International, Vol. 138, Herbst 2022.
The birth of Purgatory is a wonderful exemplar insofar as the introduction of interest resulted in Christianity’s heavenly architectural reconstruction to include the limbo of being-in-between where you find purgatory deniers, comparable to our climate deniers. See Le Goff, J. – The Birth of Purgatory, Chicago, 1984.
Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political can be read as the real breviary of identity politics, for he says that the concepts of friend and foe are to be read as an amalgam with which an in-group can be established and at the same time demarcated from an out-group: The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation. See Schmitt, C. – The Concept of the Political, [Schwab, G., translator], Chicago, 2007, p. 26.
Latour, B & Schultz, N – Zur Entstehung einer ökologischen Klasse Ein Memorandum, Berlin 2022, p. 39.
See Meadows, Donatella & Dennis [and others]. The Limits to Growth; a Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New York, 1972.