Slavoj Žižek, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Philosophy of Climate Change

“It does not take an expert logician to deduce that if climate catastrophe were really upon us, we would also observe people giving extreme warnings, and it could even be the case that they still would not support, for example, nuclear power.”

Climate change is, without a doubt, one of the central issues of our time. Even for climate skeptics or “climate deniers,” having to engage with the concept of climate change is hard to avoid. The fact that climate skeptics exist is even more evidence of the pervasiveness of the concept of climate change in public discourse—as it forces everyone to, at least, take a side. The problem is that the scientific dimension, while undoubtedly among the debate’s most important components, is far from the only one. It is true that a majority of climate scientists believe that climate change is happening—and that human activities have an impact on increases in global temperatures. But the skeptic side is not exclusively comprised of conspiracy theorists. Serious climate scientists such as MIT professor Richard Lindzen, who outlined his arguments in a 2017 Merion West piece, remain critical of the mainstream view. Now, I happen to believe that climate change is happening and that human activity has an impact on it, but I am not a climate scientist. Thus, I am neither the person most qualified to refute the arguments of serious climate scientists in the vein of Lindzen nor the best person to present the scientific case for its existence. As I said, there are multiple dimensions to the discourse surrounding climate change, so I will address some of the others. My concerns here are rather specific to certain political aspects of the debate and, particularly, their epistemological status or, put differently, the way in which we can analyze the validity of such arguments.

Climate change should be seen in this light too: as a challenge to the idea that the Earth and its biomes are somehow specifically apt to supporting human life.

Before dealing with the specifics, some context is necessary. One of the difficulties when talking about climate change is that the concept is difficult to grasp. In a recent Merion West piece, Matt McManus argues that climate change is a challenge to the anthropocentric worldview, which is prevalent in much of Western philosophy. In McManus’ view, an awakening to climate change is akin to three previous events in the history of ideas that have contested our anthropocentric worldview. This is a line of argument also identified by Slavoj Žižek in The Parallax View. In this book, Žižek argues that events such as the Copernican revolution, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the emergence of depth psychology deeply challenged the notion that we, as human beings, had a special place in the universe. The first one does this by refuting  ideas about our physical place in the universe, while the latter two dispel the notion that our rationality and other advantages (that we possess relative to other species) are anything other than biological accidents, resulting from (often) random chemical processes. Climate change should be seen in this light too: as a challenge to the idea that the Earth and its biomes are somehow specifically apt to supporting human life.

In a somewhat related fashion, British philosopher Timothy Morton argues that climate change (or global warming to use his own terminology) is what he calls a “hyperobject.” Morton’s theory of hyperobjects is part of a broader philosophical framework called Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). I disagree with many aspects of his perspective, and an explanation of the details of his position is beyond the scope of the present discussion. However, we do not need to be fully committed to OOO in order to appreciate some of Morton’s insights. The term hyperobjects refers to entities that are so spatially and temporally large that they defy human comprehension. Hyperobjects, according to Morton, are “viscous” and “nonlocal.” The former means that they tend to stick to (or affect) anything they come in contact with, while the latter means that any manifestation of the hyperobject that we experience is not the hyperobject itself, nor a separate related entity. More concretely, it is possible for us to observe and grasp events like the destruction of glaciers, but these events are not in themselves climate change. In a sense, then, our only experience of climate change is limited to things and events that fit in our spatial and temporal sense of scale. This makes the real phenomenon, the hyperobject, ineffable for us.