May 15, 2015 03:44 PM
http://www.publicbooks.org/nonfiction/th...-modernity
EXCERPT: It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that capitalism is the engine behind the environmental crises of the early 21st century. It doesn’t even take a Marxist: as the French environmental journalist Hervé Kempf put it in a recent book, it’s not so much Homo sapiens as the rich who are destroying the earth—rich people, rich nations. His claim is backed up by reams of data, and he’s not the only one who’s making it (see, for instance, the latest volume by Naomi Klein). So why do we cling to the idea that it’s “humanity”—humanity in some essential sense, not just the accidents of particular human societies—that’s brought the planet to the brink of disaster? Mark Greif’s probing new book, The Age of the Crisis of Man, offers a kind of prehistory of this humanity’s-to-blame discourse, and therefore the beginnings of an explanation for its resilience.
From the very start of his book [The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America], [Mark] Greif is up front about the limits of the discourse he’s reconstructed for us. He describes the experience of realizing, to his dismay, “how tedious, how unhelpful” the crisis-of-man language feels, in the rearview mirror. And he is unsparing in his criticisms of how, for instance, such language erased the specifics of the lives of women, colonized people, and people of color in its deployment of the idea of “man.” Again and again, however, just when he’s on the brink of suggesting there might be better ways to think about the political, economic, and ecological crises of the past century, he shies away, as though it would be rude to criticize the prominent thinkers who produced this “tedious, unhelpful” language.
At the heart of the discourse was the question of whether there’s just something innately self-destructive about Homo sapiens, and that concern, Greif shows, expressed itself in questions about history, about religion and faith and ideology, and about technology. Can there be progress? Is faith in a higher power, or even just faith in humanity’s ability to become its best collective self, built from the same materials as susceptibility to the worst authoritarianism? Now that we’ve built atom bombs and gas chambers, have we lost control of our own powers of technological innovation?
The agonized questions driving this discourse attracted an extraordinary range of renowned commentators.
[...] As it turns out, one way to understand the failures of the crisis-of-man discourse is to track its disqualification of capitalism and colonialism as objects of critique, and to tally the costs of its failure to think past the gendered limits of the word “man.” It is clear from Greif’s exasperation with the crisis discourse that he knows this. But just when you think he might bring down the hammer, he chastises himself instead. In a fascinating coda, he imagines speaking backward into history and warning the crisis theorists that once they base their sense of history on a story of human essence, or essence betrayed, “you’ve begun asking the wrong analytic questions for your moment.” But a page later he recoils: “I can say nothing of this sort … How could I tell anyone to desist? How can the dispassionate analyst ever discourage even what seems to him to be folly? Persist in folly! Without folly, how would we ever have history?”
This is a costly generosity, since it gives a pass to a discourse that still pops up like a whack-a-mole in our new era, ready to explain contemporary capitalist and ecological crises in terms of some failure of humanity to be its best self, or some innate violence in our nature. This is what the language of “modernity” does: it pursues intransitive questions of human essence instead of relational questions about what some humans have done to other humans. Climate change: we’re all in this together! That may be true, but erasing the history of how “we” got here will only make it harder to see the contours of the planet-devouring system that has forced some of us to reproduce it for the benefit of some others, decade after decade.....
EXCERPT: It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that capitalism is the engine behind the environmental crises of the early 21st century. It doesn’t even take a Marxist: as the French environmental journalist Hervé Kempf put it in a recent book, it’s not so much Homo sapiens as the rich who are destroying the earth—rich people, rich nations. His claim is backed up by reams of data, and he’s not the only one who’s making it (see, for instance, the latest volume by Naomi Klein). So why do we cling to the idea that it’s “humanity”—humanity in some essential sense, not just the accidents of particular human societies—that’s brought the planet to the brink of disaster? Mark Greif’s probing new book, The Age of the Crisis of Man, offers a kind of prehistory of this humanity’s-to-blame discourse, and therefore the beginnings of an explanation for its resilience.
From the very start of his book [The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America], [Mark] Greif is up front about the limits of the discourse he’s reconstructed for us. He describes the experience of realizing, to his dismay, “how tedious, how unhelpful” the crisis-of-man language feels, in the rearview mirror. And he is unsparing in his criticisms of how, for instance, such language erased the specifics of the lives of women, colonized people, and people of color in its deployment of the idea of “man.” Again and again, however, just when he’s on the brink of suggesting there might be better ways to think about the political, economic, and ecological crises of the past century, he shies away, as though it would be rude to criticize the prominent thinkers who produced this “tedious, unhelpful” language.
At the heart of the discourse was the question of whether there’s just something innately self-destructive about Homo sapiens, and that concern, Greif shows, expressed itself in questions about history, about religion and faith and ideology, and about technology. Can there be progress? Is faith in a higher power, or even just faith in humanity’s ability to become its best collective self, built from the same materials as susceptibility to the worst authoritarianism? Now that we’ve built atom bombs and gas chambers, have we lost control of our own powers of technological innovation?
The agonized questions driving this discourse attracted an extraordinary range of renowned commentators.
[...] As it turns out, one way to understand the failures of the crisis-of-man discourse is to track its disqualification of capitalism and colonialism as objects of critique, and to tally the costs of its failure to think past the gendered limits of the word “man.” It is clear from Greif’s exasperation with the crisis discourse that he knows this. But just when you think he might bring down the hammer, he chastises himself instead. In a fascinating coda, he imagines speaking backward into history and warning the crisis theorists that once they base their sense of history on a story of human essence, or essence betrayed, “you’ve begun asking the wrong analytic questions for your moment.” But a page later he recoils: “I can say nothing of this sort … How could I tell anyone to desist? How can the dispassionate analyst ever discourage even what seems to him to be folly? Persist in folly! Without folly, how would we ever have history?”
This is a costly generosity, since it gives a pass to a discourse that still pops up like a whack-a-mole in our new era, ready to explain contemporary capitalist and ecological crises in terms of some failure of humanity to be its best self, or some innate violence in our nature. This is what the language of “modernity” does: it pursues intransitive questions of human essence instead of relational questions about what some humans have done to other humans. Climate change: we’re all in this together! That may be true, but erasing the history of how “we” got here will only make it harder to see the contours of the planet-devouring system that has forced some of us to reproduce it for the benefit of some others, decade after decade.....
