The end of globalisation and the return of localisation - Rupert Read's keynote lecture

[Applause] thank you and good morning I'm very pleased to open this session day two and what I understand to in a superb conference yesterday I'm sorry I couldn't join you I have just started as the head of the Department of Education practice and society here at the IO II and were absolutely delighted to sponsor this event and indeed to introduce Rupert Reed Rupert is known to many of you as a result of his extensive work and his forthright comments and analysis on the state of the world he's been a spokesperson for extinction rebellion and a most articulate one as well he is also a philosopher and a public intellectual and the author of these two new books this civilization is finished and facing up to climate reality honesty dishonesty and hope and these books speak to major debates which we are having within our intellectual communities but also more broadly questions about just how far mitigation will take us if indeed it will the need for adaptation and the threat and very real danger of collapse Rupert will say much more about this about these themes and also offer his own vision as to what we can do as academics as activists and as concerned members of the public so with that I'd like to turn over to Rupert and please join us [Applause] thanks bread and yeah it's real honor to be here giving this prestigious all heck lecture what are my credentials to be giving this lecture well you've already heard one or two things let me just add slightly to that that's I think of myself as a political philosopher who cut my teeth in that field radically critiquing on both ecological and social justice grounds the political philosophy of liberal individualism and as an activist I've been an activist well all my adult life really but in the last year I've become involved with extinction rebellion and well it seems to me that the activism I've been involved with over the last year has been more significant than all the activism I've been involved with in the previous 20 or 30 years we accomplished something really deeply encouraging I would say to you in April of this year especially in this country with extinction rebellion when in two weeks as we held on to some iconic public spaces in London we really transformed the public debate and consciousness in this country around ecology and especially around climate and I think that the extraordinary success of that rebellion in doing that and the success is measurable in opinion polls if you want to look into it it's very very striking is actually about the most hopeful development at least in this country and possibly in Europe for about a generation really in terms of the kind of things that we're concerned with in a conference like this one so yes as Browder said and as I've just reinforced I come here as a philosopher and as an activist but I must tell you that in both capacities I come here with a slight sense of trepidation for while temperamentally and historically I would certainly consider myself on I have no doubt an ally of most of you in this room and while I'm encouraged by the static reception that you gave Vandana Shiva yesterday because I regard myself as among other things a kind of disciple of her work I come here with a message that many of you will I think nevertheless find hard not to resist to some extent at least for my philosophy and my activism alike have pushed me to repudiate the very widely hegemonic doctrine of human developments a doctrine associated among other things with the very name and ambition of this lecture so yeah come here with a slight sense of trepidation we'll see whether or not that sense is justified I should stress that this repudiation that I'm about to make is very much my own if you don't like it please don't blame extinction rebellion for it though as I say it does come from my experience both as an activist and as a philosopher so I hope to keep this lecture relatively short because I think that given what I'm gonna be saying here we're gonna need plenty of time for some back-and-forth Q&A dialogue if we're to understand each other over this most vital of matters so let me speak to be as succinct as possible I am truthful perhaps brutally so for which I've become known over the past few years as his urgent end is necessary we've no time left for a beating around the bush so I don't believe that what is called development is a good objective we all I hope know the awful history of the concept of development which originated in the Truman administration as basically a way for countries like the United States to say the whole world ought to be like us a project of extraordinary arrogance and hubris development ality is a doctrine of European or American supremacy and I think that should give us deep cause to doubt it I don't believe that development makes people happy or fulfilled either and I will return to this consideration but whether or not I'm right in these stark claims is in a way I want to say irrelevant for the even more unpalatable truth I want to convey to you this morning is climate and ecological breakdown is going to make development history anyway just gonna write this sort of slogan on the blackboard it might remind some of you of something make development history climate ecological breakdown is already making development history and this is only the beginning development in the sense at least of growing economic opportunity about the world is about to be terminated we must face up to climate reality otherwise earth will terminate us and make us history and that's why my think-tank greenhouse put together this book facing up to climb reality really facing out the kind of reality changes everything let me just check in with you for a couple of minutes that you're all aware of why this is so it's a it's a stark story and I'm gonna put it to you it and most starkly in the form of a statistic so if you burn petrol in your car as you know it creates bursts of intense heat which powers the extraordinary internal combustion engine and that intense heat then dissipates into the atmosphere what also dissipates into the atmosphere is carbon at the same time of course and that carbon stays up in the atmosphere for a very long time and every day it stays up there it adds a little bit to the heating effect it traps a little bit more heat in the atmosphere and over time guess how much stronger the greenhouse effect is than the effect of the original heat so you've got the burst of heat from burning the petrol and then you've got the heat that gets trapped in the atmosphere over the coming years decades centuries by the carbon released by that same burning of petrol and the trapped heat that is trapped is about 60,000 times as much as you got from burning the petrol in the first place and that is why we are basically fossil fuels are weapons of mass self sixty thousand times the amount of heat gets trapped in the atmosphere from that petrol from the carbon that's released from it as compared to the already quite significant amount that you get from the firelight and of course the reason why that figure is so enormously high is precisely because the carbon stays in the atmosphere for decades for centuries and of course that's also the reason why there's this terrible time lag effect in relation to climate we are now feeling the effect of the climb of the carbon that was put into our atmosphere in the 60s 70s 80s and over half the carbon that has ever been released by human beings has been released since then and we're still barely feeling that effect right since we knew about the devastation of the greenhouse effect let's say by 1990 no one could deny it except the completely absurd people who in small numbers continued to do so since then we've doubled the amount that we that we've put out the same amount of in the entire previous amount of of human history and it will stay there for decades or centuries and that's why even if we were to stop all emissions tomorrow all emissions tomorrow the climatic situation would continue to worsen for at least a generation probably significantly longer those time lags really our worst enemy yes so the story we tell ourselves of a continual increase of the human standard of living is over conditions for beings on this planet are without doubt going to decline for at least a generation probably significant longer what probably significantly longer whatever we do even if we do exactly what extinction rebellion is rightly urging us to do the situation will get much worse still unless we overcome our addiction to development in as much again as development translates into industrial growth ISM if you think about it in terms of the sustainable development goals the sustainable development goal undermine systematically whatever is good in all the other sustainable element goals we are in an emergency a long effectively permanent emergency it will define increasingly the entirety of the lives of all of us in this hall and all of us in the world we need therefore an emergency break on climate deadly emissions and on habitat destruction we are heading for collapse deadly anthropogenic climate change is not some kind of unexpected Black Swan event it is as I like to put it a white swan in plain view heading serenely towards us as we head serenely towards self-destruction and when I say we here I mean pretty much all of us internationally our systems are so fragile partly of course because they are so globalized so excessively interconnected it is going to take an utterly unprecedented enormous rapid course correction now to prevent collapse and to be clear and unambiguous when I talk about collapse I mean global collapse making mass death I mean probably billions not just millions very likely the basic truth of my title therefore of my talk is I claim unarguable globalization is finished the future will be far more real oak alized short carbon liked relatively resilient supply lines will define that define the future this is fact the only issue is whether we get there accidentally or on purpose right the only issue is whether we get there as a result of collapse or as a result of a rapid unprecedented wonderful court correction and that is what I mean when I say that this civilization is finished the only way we are going to survive without collapse is if we transform our civilization so rapidly and deeply that it will in no meaningful sense be the same civilization that we currently inhabit but the inevitable end of globalization and the rebirth of the local could yet be the making of us it could even be super be serendipitous if we make it the basis of civilizational transformation how exactly does the germ of an idea that I've Stafford translate into the story of human development so we have a supposedly developed global north and a developing global South the usual assumption is that the south will over time catch up and what I'm saying is quite obviously it can't there is no ecological space for it to do so what I'm saying might therefore seem to make the vast inequality of our world today permanent and that would of course be intolerable but what if together we got off the development treadmill what if we got off the development drug that's altogether what have we all stopped prising it what if those of us who've been hooked on the drug the longest went cold turkey what we stopped pretending that the story of the last 300 years is a story of linear progress what if instead of seeking further such progress and development we instead thought to build down our footprints to congroo if I are cells once more with nature and with our deeper cells you see mine is absolutely not a Council of despair the end of a development ality does not have to mean the end of humanity on the contrary it could yet lead to things actually getting better even within the context of the kind of deteriorating climate that is inevitable for the foreseeable future how so well here we come to what I like to call in the phrase which is the title of my next book the beautiful coincidence what is the beautiful coincidence the beautiful coincidence is that the very things we need to do in order to avoid climatic and ecological nemesis are by and large they're very things we need to do in order to create a world that is more happy more fulfilled with more of a sense of meaning to for example and the epidemic of loneliness which has the entire global North pretty much in its grip to rebuild community and of course we're gonna have a reason to struggle in a struggle not against a scapegoat evil enemy but against the specter of our own self-destruction for a long time to come relocation means livelihoods it means good meaningful secure livelihoods you can begin understanding this with things like the local food movement slow food and so forth the things that here in a country like this one we're just starting painfully to rediscover having sent centuries systematically obliterating them we developed countries really are not all that we are cracked up to be the death of the fantasy of development is something desirable and possible starts here the beautiful coincidence is that we localization and a systemic reduction of our ecological footprint is exactly what we need to overcome the deep malaise in which societies like this one are stuck we can think of something better than the UK or the USA in anything like their current form as our destiny we can already see that something in embryo in such venues as the transition towns movement in Community Supported Agriculture and permaculture and agroforestry or generally in agro ecology and looking further afield in Via Campesina and in the way indeed that some adivasi people are still living and much more the question may be forming in some of your minds those of you unconvinced by the direction of travel of my remarks you may be thinking that it's very easy for me to sit here or stand here in luxury and lecture the world on how to be perhaps the question has a starker form in your mind who the hell is this white well-educated middle class middle aged heterosexual man to stand in front of a large audience and lecture them on how to be okay there are three elements to my answer to this possible question the first is let's have an open discussion between equals let's dispense with ad hominem nonsense and get into the actual content of what I'm talking about let's please be courageous and open enough to listen to the content of what I have to say and not shoot the messenger because you know actually we really are all in this together in a very meaningful sense what I mean by that you might be thinking it's all very well to be saying this from a privileged UK context but something very important about the UK is that we're miles away from being self-sufficient in terms of food England is a country that is more density England is a country bit more densely populated than India not many people know that what's the significance of us being unselfish and in food well of course the significance in terms of their likelihood of coming climate breakdown is that it's quite likely that there'll be a time five years from now 10 years from now 15 years from now probably within my lifetime unless everything changes where there is a Multi breadbasket failure which affects not just Britain but many other countries and where Britain as usual recourse the thing of the buy food from around the world suddenly starts to look a lot less easy as multiple countries close their frontiers to food exports has happened in 2007 to 8 but it'll happen much worse in kind of scenario in a climate ravaged future which we are moving into and so we are absolutely not immune in this country to the terrible future that is now looming over us in fact we might be one of the worst sufferers from it in time to come so the first element my answer and I hope it's enough is let's just talk about this and try to drop our identities as one thing or another and have a serious rational and emotional discussion about this most existential of matters if that element of my answer doesn't satisfy you though I've got a couple more more content 'fl if you will elements to my answer to this question I'm imagining that might be in some of your minds so secondly I don't ask you primarily to listen to me nor even to the wisdom traditions of Western Eastern philosophy that have been my greatest inspirations but I do ask you to listen to the indigenous peoples and peasant peoples of the world I do ask you to listen to those indigenous peoples who have been defending a vision of more harmonious ways of living and a prospering for centuries and the third element of my answer to the question that I posed is listen to if you can to the voice of the earth itself I think here theodoro checks work consider that the mother of all mental health crises is coming as people around the world wake up to what industrial growth capitalism aka development is doing to our security and our posterity you think that we're already suffering from a mental health epidemic you're right but you ain't seen nothing yet it's gonna get far far worse over the coming decade but you know this crisis too could be the making of us and this is the insight at the heart of the new emerging discipline of ecopsychology which suggests that when people feel eco anxiety they're feeling something which is create and far from being a sign of mental ill-health it's actually in the big sense of things a sign of an emerging health and awakening health and actually this is a key reason for the success of extinction rebellion extinction rebellion is among other things a mode of processing emotions that we've been long trying to hide eco anxiety terror at our future horror at what we're doing to the world deep grief at what's already been lost these things when seen correctly I say again are not mental ill-health on the contrary and of course what underlies them all is love which extinction rebellion also talks about seeks to unleash why do we grieve because we love extinction rebellions first demand is tell the truth tell the truth about how bad things are and what happens if we open ourselves to that demand as we face reality we emotes and resonate appropriately with it and with each other and then we are ready to act literally vitally and then we are the earth coming to a painful consciousness and of course my second the third point here are connected return to some kind of sense of the sacredness of the earth maybe a scenic one on for us to find our way out of our awful predicament possibly what I've just been saying is - mystical for some of you if it is then let me make the point more plainly there are people who are protecting the earth's remaining viable ecosystems people who can teach us how to live life more lightly on the earth I'm not bothered whether you listen to me or not so long as you listen to them and as you do so listen to what the earth squeaking systems themselves seem to be saying to us for obviously one key reason why everything is changing in our consciousness around climate in ecology and why extinction rebellion and the climate school strikes are kicking off and finding a vast resonance is the way we can see in the last three years or so our climate spinning out of control in real time if you still think that I'm lecturing the so-called developing world then let me say this all of this really does begin at home a return to love and to life begins at home in countries like this one after all we started the trouble Industrial Revolution began not very far away from where I'm standing right now we have absolutely no leg to stand on if as well as massive free greentech transfer we don't lead the way in restoring biodiversity and decarbonizing at the very least we need to cut the ground from under the argument that we have no right to want to develop in countries to use less fossil fuels given how much we're still using ourselves we can cut the ground from that argument only by undertaking a dramatic energy descent will never be listened to unless we finally lead a little by following the example of indigenous earth protectors of Sabah Dian Swaraj etc the transformation the end of the impossible fantasy of industrial growth ISM begins here and now and that's why I think it's significant and appropriate that extinction rebellion has begun here and so again I say we developed countries are not all they're cracked up to be that's what the existence of a rebellion against our current way of life recognizes and I think also here of Helena Norberg Hodges marvelous reality Tours what Helena norburg Hodge the founder of the local futures movement does in these reality tours is she brings indigenous and peasants people to a country like this one or to the United States and she shows them the glitzy shopping malls and she shows them the vast landfills and she shows them the places where old people are warehoused in countries like this one she shows them the victims of the opioid epidemic and so on she shows them the reality of a country like this and of course actually the reality is much worse the disco Li a ssin of so much of the global south from the burning rainforests to the desolate cobalt mines from the vast piles of old fridges that we've exported to China to the vanishing Island States is largely of course down to us doubly so since the unbelievably unbelievably stupid export of our most polluting industries to China and India that's the importance of our push in extinction rebellion to get the government to tell the real truth about embodied emissions see our government goes around posturing in the world and posturing to its citizens saying I look at these amazing emissions reductions figures that we've got in the United Kingdom what we say is you're just lying with statistics right when you do the statistics properly when you include all the crap that we've exported to to China and India and so forth you see that our emissions have barely fallen since 1990 once you see our true footprint it's doubly true that we're not all the way across out to be and one of the best things that people like me can do I think is rid the world of the illusion that we're a tell us devoutly to be wish'd how can we be this is really the crux of the matter how can we be developed complete adequate given an adequate complete rendition of the profound ugliness 'as and catastrophes at the heart of our way of living most pointedly how can a way of living be a developed way of living if it points directly over the cliff of collapse this question I believe quite obviously has no answer except to say it can't and it isn't the economic way of life if countries like this one is not something to be aimed at it is in fact shameful and absurd it is criminal to be part of a way of life that is quite possibly on the way toward extinguishing complex life on Earth okay moving towards a close before I finish let me note in passing that I'm not imposing a new Dogma to replace develop mentality a new Dogma a very localization rather I say to you quite simply it is coming whether you like it or not so let's implement it intelligently what does that mean so of course we need international coordination in fact much greater international coordination against threats that know no borders so most obviously climate of course we need also some Network capacity to respond to disasters the tide of which will inevitably as I've already mentioned rise over the next generation or to those disasters too by the way could yet be the making of us they may hold an enormous silver lining Rebecca Solnit has written about this this in perhaps a most important book the Paradise is built in catastrophe and that's not quite the title of it the paradise is built in Hell the Paradise is built in Hell a book in which she looks at the way in which disasters can be transformative to the communities that experience them because they obliterate the dysfunctional status quo and force people into a more giving altruistic more forward-looking way of being together and sometimes have quite long lasting consequences and there's a chapter on this that ICO also didn't facing up to climate reality becoming climate disasters if we're willing to respond to them in the right way could yet be the making of us and yes of course we need some Network capacity to respond to them not purely locally as well so yeah of course let's implement a real local ization intelligently but let's be clear localization is going to replace globalization as a general direction of travel and depending on how this is done the development industry will either yield to collapse or to a new sense of community living together much more likely on the earth to the transformation of the status quo a transformation that voices in the global South have been calling for which extinction rebellion joins many in countries like this one in calling for in the future I'm imagining we'll be living on much less and in adversity but I I claim likely to be happier in the process as we were by the way in World War two when of course in this country the country became far more equal suicide rates dropped and basically it became a happier place to be despite the extreme adversity which people are suffering under so I hope to be part of building this community with you in a quasi wartime mobilization which we're going to need permanently if we're going to escape from a terrible collapse event this new old political philosophy which offers us even now the splendid chance of an ancient future is being pretty good right now in a small way in for example the beautiful actions of extinction rebellion which I had the great privilege for instance to be a part of when we transformed Waterloo Bridge this April for example into a garden and into a skate park I hope that you will join us so that this ancient future will take root and flourish friends the darkest hour really is just before the dawn perhaps April of this year was a first ray of light of that dawn thank you for your time and attention and I look forward to dialoguing with you now in the significant amount of time that we're gonna have to go back and forth and to see whether I really ought to feel that trepidation or not thank you [Applause] so we're going to take questions from the audience will be seated here we have a roving mic which I will this one so we're going to take questions in groups we've got woman sitting right there yes another woman there yes and the woman there so you have the green mic hello yeah thank you very much for a very stimulating lecture I just have a very short question so even if we agree I mean we let's say we agree with all the arguments put forth so do you see what is the process through which you see I mean have you gone further in your thinking as to how this can happen this no intelligent delocalized real localization as you said is it the north catching up with the South if so in what way do we learn from these communities and what is the process to which we can go in that direction thank you I'll take the second question yes should I wait till you're finished with writing yeah okay so I I agree with much of what you've said and I think so I'm a philosopher and economist and much of climate as ethicists would also agree with the line of argument you've been you are developing and of course people who were are activists also but what I would like to question is that you want to get rid of the word development and especially to this association I think it's barking up the wrong tree so to say because the whole point of the age see a is to come with the new conceptualization of development so as philosophers we know that the term needs to be special specified or filled in before we know what it means and you using your word development economic growth the number one insight from this association is economic growth is not development so we are actually I think more allies in this respect then you may seem to believe however I do think there is a challenge for anybody working with the capability approach and human development paradigm and that is that the the so if you define human development as flourishing and flourishing is an expansion of capabilities to some extent it doesn't need to be maximizing with just expansion especially for those who are really worse off then the question is which capabilities and their I think what your story is urging us to do is to consider the ecological impact of different capabilities so the non-material capabilities should weigh heavier in our idea of human wellbeing than the material capabilities and there I think we have we facing the real challenge we face a solid political philosophers and that is that political philosophy especially in the liberal version and also especially mainstream welfare colonists they accept whatever people choose as their own understanding of well-being so what I think intellectually speaking what we need to do first is to have a discussion on what does well-being mean if you don't look at it from the first-person perspective but from the third-person person's perspective and we will have to fight what economists call consumer preference or consumer sovereignty and what in philosopher what philosophers call well the core tenant of liberal liberalism that we do not question each other's preferences and they're our allies in political philosophy that have looked at those thank you thank you okay we had one here eons Thank You dr. Reid that was a very very inspiring talk but I think that you know in most such forums we are trying to you know I agree with a lot of what you said but I think that in most such forums we are trying to educate the educated if I'm not quite exaggerating the point but what we need is really to spread awareness and the conviction that you know things are wrong in this disrespect and this is how we can you know go back to the localization and so on so you know I just be the first interrogator who she raised this question about the processes so really my concern is also that and also like I said you know being a teacher of philosophy we can do so much only but how do we get the policymakers who are really going to frame the policies which are going to determine how we are going to proceed as individuals as collectives in to to sort of aspire for this goal and to attain this goal that is something I would like you to enlighten us on because you've also been an activist what are your experiences and how as individuals not just as professionals houses as individuals in the family in the larger group and as citizens how can we make the difference and how can we beginning to make the difference thank you thank you okay yeah well what fantastic questions thank you I'm encouraged I'll start with the first one there's so much to say right that here's a few pointers so among other things an intelligent very localized ation clearly needs to be bottom-up it needs to involve a lot of experiments and models the the threats of all sorts of good examples as you say it clearly needs to involve the north learning from the South there's clearly a role for education and that involves many of us here but I mean when I say education also in a you know in a more if you will dramatic sense I think we should build into our educational system in a country like this one the north learning from the South now that is a absolute revolution that virtually happens not at all in this country even even at university level it doesn't really happen certainly doesn't happen at school level we should we should build we should have people being taught at school stuff like how to grow food which is probably going to need to know in the future but we should also build into that and around that a sense of of for example ways of growing food that have become completely D familiarized in this country because the way that most food is growing in this country and in most of the world now of course is through the use of you know vast combine harvesters so huge now that they that they compact the soil fatally and so on and so forth right we've got it we've got to turn that onto its head so that would be a kind of powerful sort of for instance of the kind of reversal of perspective that I'm proposing in my talk which you correctly characterized as as the north learning from the right elements of the south those elements I haven't been corrupted etc well we also clearly need is something like extinction rebellion right and we needed it across the world or at least across the global North a lying with similar movements or spawning similar or the same movements or alongside similar movements in the global south we need something like extinction rebellion to transform consciousness in the way it started to do this this country in this country in April and since and that's gonna be hopefully taken to a whole new level this October in the next phase of the of the international rebellion and unless we have something like that some kind of huge transformational event that turns into action soon then we will collapse even despite all the best intentions of people learning from the bottom up and changing educational systems and so forth and that brings me to the third question which is yeah what can one do as a teacher of philosophy and and as I think you've correctly intuited what I would say you can do as a teacher of philosophy is you can be a really good teacher of philosophy and you can you can land these deep and difficult truths on your students and you can discuss them in conferences like this one you can publish on them and so on and none of that is enough or you also need to do if you're actually serious about this is to make your actions beyond your professional life congruent with what you're saying so those of you who live in this country or who are gonna be near Berlin or Paris or any of the other places where the rebellion will be happening in a big way this October I I say to you come and get arrested with me this October that's that's the way we might actually start to get the kind of change that is enough and if you're not up for coming getting arrested yeah that's fine but take the first step express solidarity and at least join us in mass nonviolent direct action because of course one of the wonderful things about mass nonviolent direct action is actually if there are huge numbers of you then most of you will not get arrested because they it can't physically be done just like that it can only be done over time yeah so it's really easy to take part in mass nonviolent direct action even if you do not want to get arrested so so to do that you know that there really is if you believe the kinds of things that we saying you're ready to lower your resistance to the truth of them that's the kind of next step that you need to make now turning to the the really important question of of how we align this with political philosophy do I think we should get rid of the term development you know at the end of the day that's a kind of pragmatic question which I don't have strong views about as I did say briefly I do think the term is profoundly tarnished by its history I do think it's a very very challenging term to really recuperate in the way that most of you in the hdca as I understand it wish to do I think it's it's a term which is yeah it's very hard to see how you could in escape its its genealogy in terms of the capability approach you know very briefly as I think you were perhaps implying in my view it tends to be too individualistic I when I when I think when I read the word the work of people like saying I'm all sort of in two minds is this sort of a sort of the best possible version of liberal political philosophy in which case I say it's still not good enough and it's still it's still in a frame which is which is fundamentally hopeless in relation to our challenge or is it something genuinely different and ingenuine Lee Aristotelian and potentially ecological and so on and so forth is there really the possibility of of questioning each other's preferences and where you've described is there really the possibility of escaping an individualistic frame or not and and I'm not really sure but what I'm inclined to think is that at those moments where the capabilities approach really escapes from from any kind of alignment to liberal individualistic political philosophy and at the kind of moments where you really are kind of leaving behind all the disastrous kind of baggage of the concept of developments then it seems to me that you may be you might as well just kind of make a bit more of a radical break in the way that I described but at the end of the day I'm not really that bothered if you actually can succeed in genuinely kind of recuperating a concept like development and and and taking it out of the bounds of liberal individualism then great more power to you I wouldn't have ever characterized it in the way I think you very briefly did as more of a third personal than a first personal orientation in my philosophy the third person is absolutely no advance on the first person it's simply the other side of the same coin it's a fantasy of complete externality and objectivity speaking in terms of persons what the the model that I think is really helpful is the idea of the first person plural and the idea of the of a second person of actually facing facing others looking into their faces and perceiving their reality as as other beings and in some of my work recently I've been arguing that we ought to get beyond the the dichotomy which I think has completely poisoned the history of Western philosophy of first person versus third person and the way you get beyond it I say is through the first-person plural and through the second person and of course those they need further integration in the way I briefly alluded to in a broader ecological community of interviewing so let's take some more questions so you've got a question from James mill up there what question up there question there hello I was just wondering could you expand a bit more on the work that you've been doing with extinction rebelling because for now it's already good but I'd be very interested to get some more well concrete testimonies if you please pass the mic to the gentleman in the orange behind thank you very much Ladakh and thanks to externally extinction rebellion and yourself for all the noise you've been making you know particularly to the bankers and the city of London it's much appreciated and much needed I am gonna challenge on one thing though which is your champion of Helena norburg Hodge I dunno the DAC quite well I know some of the critiques of the ladies of Helena work and I don't believe there's any ladakh ease in the room so in their absence a lot of ancient futures which you repeated a couple of times includes no critique of ideas of polyandry with women being owned by multiple men within the family structure so London doesn't get disaggregate London doesn't get split up within the family so Lang can be productive like you're arguing she there's no critique is she critiques the development of roads within Levac however Levac still has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in india and the traditional birth attendants would not be addressing that and so is your argument that those women should not have access to hospital care should not people who have diabetes shouldn't have insulin is that the ancient futures that Helen over in yourself wish to advocate thanks yeah really loud she's running thank you the gentleman there raised a good question and but before we go to that I really would like to compliment what you said it's inspiring and it's needed and I would like to join hands with you at the same time that I would like to understand what would be the new imagination for the world would look like how would we arrive at that imagination and what role can our universities play in it and if you were to tell me five things that need to change at UCL what could those be and and and and and and I object so five things I need to change in what you see ID UCL in the UK what could those be to arrive at that imagination because I want to see in specific what role can i play if it in the university that I work in but I also would like to link back to my own experience from the global South because I am born and brought up in in India in a deep forest in a village where which is also conflict affected area and I've just been six weeks there observing noticing making my notes and and I do think from my childhood till now things have changed drastically in my childhood things were very self-sufficient and local but at the same time as the gentleman pointed out there have been challenges and problems so it was eco friendly because food came from the local agriculture milk came from locally and my shoes were made by local shoemaker and my clothes were made by local but now it's all imported from outside and local food is brought about by the much more bigger fishes and then resold more expensively so I do see an education has become like a mass suicidal project it's part of the problem the young people are choosing couriers which are not part of the solution career and the discourse of eco sensitivities and they're all though the lifestyle has been there so so what what kind of how can i generate this discussion and I would like to do that because it bothers me what I've witnessed so yes so my question is how do we become part of that new imagination what would it look like how do we arrive at that and what needs to change in our universities okay we had just one last question really you can you can write down your notes hi Gareth Edwards University of East Anglia Ripert I like the hope and I like the momentum of extension your rebellion but I have significant doubts about the asks of extinction rebellion so this is one our X our demands declaring a climate emergency and you advocated just in your speech a quasi warlike orientation for responding to climate change mobilisation yeah quasi warlike mobilization yeah okay same diff quasi quasi more time mobilization was it because you've wartime warlike sounds a bit you know okay yeah perhaps I misheard right the questions the same anyway okay emergency powers always subjugate or suspend democracy and quench dissent what reasons if any do you have for confidence that the emergency footing you advocate will not simply result in the sacrifice of the political poor they're politically black and the politically marginalized for the sake of the rich thank you yeah great questions yeah okay so let me start with the first and the fourth question which I think connect so in terms of my own work with extinction rebellion I'm part of the XR political strategy group so I do political liaison I meet with leading politicians and put our demands to them and so forth you can watch for example the the meeting that I organized with with Michael Gove and he was deaf secretary straight after the first rebellion earlier this year you can watch that online if you want to and in general rather than spending a lot of time telling you about my work at our work I'd say you know you can google videos of me in google videos of Gale Brad Burke and our other leading figures and you can look and see stuff to do with our actions there's tons of great stuff online including on the extinction rebellion site which is worth looking at and yeah and you can hopefully catch up with stuff that you may have missed there now turning to the question of XOR and democracy so I totally appreciate the worry Gareth but I do tend to see it the other way around of course you're right that we're taking a risk but there is no scenario now here which doesn't involve enormous risk because as I say climate change dangerous anthropogenic climate change and climate breakdown is now a white swan it's it's coming to to destroy our civilization much faster than most people realize you know don't don't get sidetracked by thinking about sea level rise for example sea level rise is a terrible long-term threat but it's very likely that way before that threat has has affected most of us you know of course it's gonna it's affecting that small island states and Bangladesh and so on right now and that's appalling but most of us in this country and around the world are not going to be directly impacted by sea level rise for some time to come but we will be directly impacted by the rising tide of climate disasters we will be directly impacted some of us probably very badly possibly quite soon by food and water extreme shortages you know starvation basically stuff like that so that there's no there's no getting away from extreme risk but why do we think that the gamble is worth taking well precisely because we think it's absolutely stark staring lee obvious that representative democracy has has failed to address this crisis and it needs to be radically transformed and that is precisely what our third demand the third demand of our three demands is about so our third demand says democracy as we know it has failed therefore we call for the creation of citizens assemblies to decide how to act sufficiently to address the appalling existential crises in which we now find ourselves so we're actually calling for a review vacation of democracy looking back to ancient Athens and so forth citizens assemblies would be liberty democracy bodies super juries if you will there are extent examples of them working the most striking example perhaps in recent years is in the constitutional changes in Ireland over the last decade which of course have led to changes in relation to climate but more strikingly in relation to gay marriage and abortion very very surprising success there through because through citizens assemblies and that's what we want to see to decide how to get to the very bold and necessary objectives which we characterize for this country of carbon 0 and in biodiversity loss by 2025 in terms of the question about am I kind of leaning too much on her no no Burke Hodges work look I didn't obviously attempt any kind of detailed defense of of her book and I'm aware that there are critiques of some aspects and I don't think that Helena means to claim that old l'attaque was perfect there that would be a foolish kind of romanticization the point then would be to try to keep the best of the ancient while also where necessary making it new and that's why I talked about a new old political philosophy but the example that you give of maternal mortality rates is a very interesting one and of course there are going to be sooner or later bullets that have to be bitten if we're actually serious about saying that the future will to some extent have to be if you will ancient as well as progressive and and modern is it feasible that the world will see for the long term and ever expanding and ever more deep reaching and successful health service for all around the world along the models of kind of Western medicine we currently have answer no it is not possible because the the the infrastructure of endless industrial growth that it would require is incompatible with the continuation of organized civilized life of any kind on earth so we're going to have to make some some hard choices we need to have health services in the future which are going to be less industry heavy and less tech heavy and are going to be reintegrating some old and traditional knowledge and models of of care and there are going to be depending on on families and communities more and not exclusively on professionals if you think this sounds like going backwards then to some extent you may be right to some extent I think you'll be wrong but the extent to which should be right is I put it to you once again simply being honest about the future that we are facing if you are saying we can have an endlessly expanding healthcare economy in effect then you are also saying that we are going to somehow escape the the planetary limits of growth and we are not we have over struts to overshot them already and they are going to come and take us down very soon unless we do something radical about it so it's just it's fake for anyone to pretend that in the long term it will be possible for everyone on life on Earth to have maternal mortality rate along the same kind of level that we have in this country at present that is just not ecologically possible and as I say that means we have to make some some hard and thoughtful honest choices and it's encouraging that kind of honesty which I regard as my own prime service as as someone who's who's working in the sphere of trying to be if you will a public intellectual and that takes us to the the third question which is about 20 questions in one so just to pick out a couple of interesting important aspects of it yeah we need a new imaginary I'm trying to work on that my students amel is working on that and has a fascinating piece in medium a couple of years ago about it and I think you can see aspects of it in all sorts of things including sometimes in in fiction and in in films that try to address these things intelligently at one example that I would give is some of the work of a versatile Gwynn who I think was somebody who really tried to think about what they knew imaginary that we need might look like strikingly for example in her book the dispossessed in terms of thinking about India part of the ancient that we need it seems to me includes looking to the neglected aspects of the of the work of of Gandhi and of Tagore and the the the current trajectory of a country like India which I think you described very kind of poignant Lee and painfully in some of your remarks about what's changed is the opposite of that and that is that is the tragedy and that's the kind of thing that needs to be reversed if there is to be a human future and then taking it right down to brass tacks what kind of things need to change in UCL you know I think we actually know many of those things and I've already alluded to some some more radical versions of them I think we need serious curriculum change right it's not enough to think about not having plastic bottles and reducing outcome and travel and so forth right we actually need to get a lot more serious about pivoting our curriculum in relation to the real needs of our time so we should be doing a lot more teaching of things like agroecology we should be doing a lot more teaching about what we can learn from the kinds of people I spoke about in the in the global south we shouldn't be pretending to our students that they are likely to have settled lives as computer programmers and collect old age pensions so the kind of thing I do with my students is I confront them honestly with the kind of thing I was saying in this talk here I think we all in our different disciplines in our different ways need to be doing that and and then the curriculum would be thoroughly changed I'm gonna come back to all that I have I have some ideas and also some responsibilities in that area so I came here can we take some more questions please that was William you wanted to ask a question we've got gentlemen there we've got this lady here hello William Niklas ECL industry of education I've got a question which in some respects you've touched on in your answers to the role of democracy and your assessment of development as well and the question pertains to the role of law and legal processes and some extent is a jurisprudential question as in what is law and how two people use it and understand it with regards the climate crisis that you've identified what do you see as the role of law legal institutions legal practitioners when people both call for a reconfiguration of the current law and say there's problems with it and you've alluded to it with like the transformation of Waterloo Bridge where people are in essence going beyond the law and yet people also in tandem identify lawyers that answer both in national and international contexts so where do you see law legal processes and legal constitutions in this formation please okay can we take the second question please there was yeah gentleman there thank you very much thanks Rupert I'm Eric first I would hope that we might convince you to give development a chance I mean about 15 years ago I read sins book this is not meant to be a confessional I'll just go to a simple quote from page 9 of development as freedom we so he starts there we have to see freedom as a social product and that if you add a boob unto to it I think you've got a whole lot of what you'd like to see so that was just a small advertisement rather here's the question and it's a question for a philosopher many of us who teach this sort of material are often faced with students immediately jumping to psychological egoism as an explanation for for why people do what they perceive to be good so the general explanation which you know very well is that students believe that we are driven to do something because we wish we wish it we like it and as a consequence we're doing what we like instead of we're doing good there's a parallel rhetorical problem that I think you face and I'd love to know how you if you have thoughts on it the problem is you are very passionate you are very articulate and this draws attention to you and as a consequence many people will think you do what you do because after all it boosts your ego now I'm not meaning to suggest that this is what is going on in your head but I'm sure this is the way many people read your presentation and just as we need to break through the psychological egoism problem in students we need to break through that problem in practically all communication can we just take the one less we'll get back to what's going on in your head yeah thank you good morning my name is Anna thank you very much for your talk I think in this audience it is controversial but I'm actually with you and I'm one who suffers from echo anxiety and from teaching environmental philosophy things one of the biggest things I struggle with and I'd like your help with this is you talk about the end of globalization one of the biggest drop one of the biggest things I struggle with is the rise of nationalism xenophobia the 1% that Vandana Shiva was talking about yesterday and the power that's in the sort of that wealthy 1% and in the corporations such as Amazon Facebook and Technology and innovation that comes with it so I'm just I'm wondering and also if you think about sort of like the global institutional global economic order right there the big big sort of problems right so I struggle with how do we I mean do you think that civil disobedience and mass protest is enough to sort of change some of these embedded sort of structural sort of systems that we need to work with and we need to change I'm aware that when to change but I'm not too sure how we can do that and in where the civil to be disobedience is enough well what splendid questions yeah let's start with the the last one here if we oppose nationalism with sort of liberal individualist rootless cosmopolitanism we will lose we will lose catastrophically and in some version that's kind of what's been happening I think over the last decade or so I've written about this a bit in various little joy pieces I've published with Helena norburg Hodge in the ecologist and elsewhere about how a genuine opposition to nationalism will not embrace a kind of unrooted placeless post nationalism either and how those are actually two sides of the same coin now us will nonviolent civil disobedience be enough to take us to some kind of genuine alternative to these things well we don't know but I'm suggesting that it's our best bet or at least that it is a necessary ingredient in our best bet the question about law is relevant here because the question there was something like on the one hand people are trying to litigate around climate and so on on the other hand we're breaking the law so how do you put that together and I think the answer is fairly straightforward it's that it's the yeah it's great to use the law to achieve our ends but it's never going to be enough because the laws aren't good enough so they'll always need to be changed and I think that's pretty self-evident so what kind of change is well again I've written on this alongside Helena but it's again pretty obvious I think we need to have a law of ecocide we probably need to have laws recognizing rights of nature and being acted on and we need an in my opinion this is crucial a serious worldwide entrenchment of the precautionary principle which i think could be really quite revolutionary now turning to the question about about sin and freedom this is an immense question which again I've been trying to work on a bit myself in my philosophical work in recent years as if against in Ian I'm a great advocate of of intellectual freedom and I think that's what philosophy really is I think what philosophy really is is the attempt to free one's mind and it's very very difficult and it's a constant job and yeah I'm seeking to do that in all my work and I was seeking to do that here this morning to free us from various kinds of prejudices that hold us captive but I do think we have to be very cautious whenever we are presented as sin presents us with with a kind of with a case that suggests that actually freedom is unambiguously what we should be aiming for because I think that freedom in anything like the form in which its offered to us in liberal political philosophy is basically a catastrophe that we are living and I think that freedom is so deep built into the DNA of cultures like this one and even more so the United States in exactly ways that need to be opposed and so that's why while on the one hand it seems to me that obviously a lot of what someone like sin is talking about is to be welcomed and while as I say as a vicar Tinian and as a philosopher I believe that that their freedom intellectually is that is in many ways the ultimate value I also think that we need to be looking to resources which we have and which we can build and so on in our in our cultures and in our philosophies and in our history which actually don't speak centrally about freedom but speak far more about embeddedness and place and community and togetherness and that takes me to the the very interesting question about whether people are gonna think that I'm doing all of this Tim please my ego or not because you know um and possibly this is a good point at which to Tim's I know we're almost out of time I think a key reason for the success of extinction rebellion is that in the kind of eco psychological way that I gestured at it really does come from our deepest selves what we're doing and it comes from a sense of kind of deep embeddedness and mission and purpose which is actually the opposite of Tizen and I think that one of the reasons why when we got into the media in April those those opportunities had such power and resonance and led to the transformation of consciousness in this country into some extent beyond is that people saw people being their authentic cells including as I said they're they're emotional cells you know when when I went on channel 5 for example and said look the reason I I do this the reason we do this and the reason why 1,100 people have been willing to be arrested is because we listen to our children and we listen to the climate school strikers and what they are doing is they are begging for their lives and they're begging for the right to have a life at all and people you know heard the emotion in my voice there and and they responded to it and in the autumn rebellion what some of us are going to be doing is we're gonna be writing as we go as we go off to engage in nonviolent direct action I hope that lots of you will be there too we're gonna be writing on our forearms the names of our children or the names of our nephews and nieces and you know I don't know how you feel when you hear that but when I say it I feel a wave of kind of emotion and kind of sadness and and love and a whole load of things all kind of tied in together and that is the power of this movement and I feel that over the last year I found my voice in a way that I've never found it before in my life and I think a lot of people have found the exact same thing and in a way it's my voice in a way it's got nothing to do with me if you really there's something that's kind of much bigger that's kind of speaking through me and I think that is enormous ly exciting it gives us just a little bit of hope that we might just be able to pull this thing off [Applause] well with that I like to thank thank Rupert for this immensely rich sincere and insightful lecture I think you've won over many people I think there I think there are a number in the room that are prepared to to link arms with you and if they're not certainly to bring you water and a thermal blanket so thank you thank you [Applause]

Channel: Rupert Read

Views: 9,257

Keywords: Rupert Read, ul-Haq Lecture, Human Development & Capability Association, Developmentality

Id: JxIdhv2KHb8

Length: 74min 52sec (4492 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 30 2019