The future of the human sciences in the age of humans

If we leave economists to one side – and many of them consider themselves to be more ‘scientists’ than social scientists anyway – the interpretive social sciences and the humanities have generally been slow to respond to the crisis of climate change. Why this is so is perhaps not hard to explain. First of all, it took climate scientists themselves a long time to get their voices heard by politicians and policy-makers. It was not until the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), when the scientists involved put considerable effort in publicizing and emphasizing their ‘consensus’ (statistically defined) opinion that the current process of climate change that the planet was undergoing was indeed anthropogenic in origin and that the main culprit was the human use for close to two hundred years of fossil fuels, that the media world sat up and took notice. The immediate task before policy-makers and technologists in such a situation, it was generally understood, was to aid a world-wide transition to renewable energy and to take steps to mitigate the effects of climate change, and this is where economists, scientists, and technologists pitched in. There were indeed two issues of justice highlighted in these discussions. One was the question of so-called climate justice between developed and less-developed nations. Activists – mainly from the less-developed countries – raised early on the question of how the remaining ‘carbon space’ should be distributed between developed and developing nations, assuming that the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were a necessary evil if a nation were to pull its citizens out of poverty. This became a universally recognized issue resulting in the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ of nations in mitigating climate change. A second issue raised in these discussions was the question of what the living owed to the unborn. But the unborn are not here to press their case, so whether or not the present generation of humans addicted to fossil fuels are simply passing the buck on to future generations remains a broadly acknowledged but practically undiscussed question.

Yet, while the interpretive social sciences have been late in joining the debate on climate change – I may perhaps modestly claim that my essay ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’ (Chakrabarty, 2009) was one of the first efforts on the humanities side to draw out some implications of the crisis for the human sciences – it is now clear that however much of a geophysical phenomenon ‘climate change’ as such may be, the very idea of a ‘dangerous’ climate change involves issues that truly belong to the realm of the humanities. ¹ For who defines ‘dangerous’? As the American historian Julia Adeney Thomas pointed out recently in an essay published in the American Historical Review, the word ‘dangerous’ here cannot be a scientific word. ‘Dangerous’ alludes to values, scales, and other human priorities that are, of course, by their very nature open to further contestation. ²

One could argue, therefore, that humanities-related issues were a part of the discussion of global warming from the very beginning even though humanities scholars were relatively absent from the debates. But now the scene has changed. There are many books and articles being written on the problem of climate change by interpretive social scientists. Understandably, however, the more humanities scholars actually participate in the debates on climate change, the more the contentious nature of the human sciences comes into view. Thus, the global discussion on climate change reflects the old problem of the ‘two cultures’ in new and interesting ways. Climate scientists – in order to defeat skeptical conclusions over their findings – emphasize ‘consensus’, using the language of statistics – thus their talk of ‘such and such percentage of scientists’ and about ‘x or y level of confidence’ when they need to underline the scientific nature of their conclusion that contemporary climate change is human-induced or anthropogenic in nature. If they were not in a position to make such statements, the skeptics would say that the science was indeed ‘unsettled.’

Scholars in the humanities or in the interpretive social sciences fear no such skepticism (in part because they do not speak to governments or policy agencies). Their disciplines in any case are always ‘unsettled,’ always on the boil, with scholars subscribing strongly to particular points of view and regarding those espousing a radically different view of the world as either misguided or mischievous or just less intelligent. So if we were to ask what effects the climate crisis would have on the social and human sciences as we negotiate the crisis, some of the possible answers are already in evidence, and Marxists’ responses and the Pope’s encyclical may be considered to represent the two ends of the spectrum of responses. Marxists of various hues – with internal differences that they would themselves regard as significant – have sought to demonstrate that the origins of the climate crisis go back to what they have always regarded as the root of all evil: the capitalist mode of production. Of course, the more environmentally-minded Marxists try to infuse their Marxist analyses with an environmental awareness or spirit but scholars on the left are generally highly suspicious of any expressions that suggest the complicity of all humans in excessive emissions of greenhouse gases, the main culprit in the era of global warming. Instead, they emphasize the class-, race-, and gender-differentiated nature of human processes and institutions and try to reconcile this fact of a differentiated humanity with the observed facts of global warming and its possible consequences. It is not surprising, therefore, that expressions and names using the word ‘anthropos’ for humans – such as the Anthropocene (suggested name for a new geological epoch) or ‘anthropogenic global warming’ – have been the object of angry criticism from the left. Some on the left in fact suggest that tackling capitalism remains the most urgent task, for without that revolutionary measure, there could be no dealing with climate change, since the latter is only an effect of the cause that the expression ‘the capitalist mode of production’ names.

At the other end of this spectrum of views, on the humanist side, is the recent encyclical of Pope Francis. Francis provides a Christian critique of consumerist capitalism in the context of discussing climate change and its impact on the existing inequities of the world. But he also emphasizes a factor that Marxists, by the very nature of their framework, cannot discuss: the issue of anthropocentrism. Francis re-reads the Biblical story of Genesis to say that we have generally misunderstood what was meant by ‘man’s dominion over nature’ in that story. Humans, he says, have generally understood ‘sovereignty’ as ‘dominion’ while God intended us only to take care of his garden, much like a gardener would, and not claim exclusive ownership of it. The Pope thus develops the idea of ‘responsible stewardship’ of the planet – rather different from what is envisioned by those who now look on humanity as the ‘god species’ – and advocates a kind of ‘enlightened anthropocentrism’ on the part of humans. Such ‘enlightened anthropocentrism’ would not go – as the Pope sees it – with current capitalist practices that devalue human labor. ³

What would ‘enlightened anthropocentrism’ be? This is where a host of interventions in the humanities that now go under the names of new-materialism, posthumanism, and the actor-network-theory of Bruno Latour, would have much to offer. Enlightened or not, it is becoming clear that a purely human welfare-centric approach to the world – where humans assume that the entire planet was created simply to supply the needs of their flourishing and their flourishing alone – can only in the end be a self-harming attitude. We need to see humans in the context of planetary processes that have supported life in general for hundreds of millions of year. Marxists like Jason Moore are seeking to place the story of capital in the context of ‘the web of life.’ Others are beginning to emphasize the work that the planet does in producing fossil fuels. Still others in the human sciences are listening with care and attention to what earth systems scientists have to say by way of explaining their theses on ‘the great acceleration’ of the post-1950 world and the nine ‘planetary boundaries’ that humans can cross only at their own peril.

So here is what I see as an emerging ground – not quite a consensus, for we cannot expect that of the humanities, but more a series of points that we will be inclined to assume even as we air and argue our differences – a ground on which disputations between humanists on the role of humans in creating the current crisis of climate change will be increasingly situated. A single-minded focus on human welfare and intra-human justice will most likely seem inadequate. Philosophers who have argued for animal rights or animal liberation have already extended the sphere of human justice to include animals, though only some animals, since these philosophers usually require a sentience threshold. But that particular instance of extension of our moral community is clearly inadequate for the present, for it did not include many animals, not to speak of insects, trees, plants, and, of course, bacteria and viruses! While the sciences increasingly tell us that these different forms of life are all connected – sometimes through predatory relationships – we do not yet know what non-anthropocentrism would practically mean in this age of an enormous ecological overshoot on the part of humanity. But the scientific literature on climate change – mainly that produced by geologists, biologists, and the earth systems scientists – emphasizes the deep historical connections between geology and biology on this planet. An awareness of these connections, I think, will increasingly constitute the background against which the future interpretations of human history will emerge.

To put it simply, an awareness of ‘deep time’ is what will inform the social sciences of the future. Man will have to be placed in the larger context of the deeper history of life on this planet. This does not mean that our usual disputations about intra-human in/justice, inequalities, oppressive relationships will not continue; they will. But the climate crisis leaves us more aware of the obsessively human-centric nature of the social sciences. Such anthropocentrism may be necessary but will increasingly seem inadequate if one looks at the impact of the human ecological footprint on other forms of life and on the planet itself. So our inevitable anthropocentrism will need to be supplemented (not replaced) by ‘deep time’ perspectives that necessarily escape the human point of view. Pope Francis goes, understandably and in a thoughtful manner, to the Bible to develop a non-anthropocentric perspective. But I am not a religious person. I find non-anthropocentric perspectives from two branches of modern science: geology and biology (in particular, the evolutionary history of life). The connected stories of the evolution of this planet, its climate, and of life on it cannot be told from any anthropocentric perspective. These are necessarily stories of deep time, and they make us aware that humans come very late in the history of this planet, and that the planet was never engaged in readying itself for our arrival. We do not represent any point of culmination in the story of the planet.

If humanists and social scientists, without giving up any of their legitimate concerns, could develop a spirit of conversation with these two subjects – geology and biology – that embody deep time, we would see a dialectic of anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric perspectives playing itself out in the human sciences. This, to my mind, is what the crisis calls for and will most likely generate.