Something must have happened, some truly extraordinary event,

for the ideal of globalization to have changed valence so quickly.

Fleshing out an earlier hypothesis with a political fiction allows us
to situate this evento more precisely.
Let us suppose that, from the 1980s on, more and more people –
activists, scientists, artists, economists, intellectuals, political
parties – have grasped the increasingly endangered status of the
formerly more or less stable relations that the Earth maintained
with humans.13 Despite the difficulties, this avant-garde has
managed to accumulate evidence that those stable relations could
not last, that the Earth, too, would end up resisting.
Earlier, everyone saw quite clearly that the question of limits
would inevitably arise, but the shared decision, among the
Moderns at least, had been to ignore that question bravely by a
very strange form of disinhibition.14 One could go ahead and grab
land, use it and abuse it, without listening to the prophets of
doom, since the ground itself kept more or less quiet!
And yet, little by little, we find that under the ground of private
property, of land grabs, of the exploitation of territories, another
ground, another earth, another soil has begun to stir, to quake, to
be moved. A sort of earthquake, if you like, that led the pioneers to
say: “Watch out, nothing will be as it was before; you are going to
have to pay dearly for the return of the Earth, the outburst of
powers that had been tame until now.”
And here is where the hypothesis of political fiction comes in.
Suppose that other elites, perhaps less enlightened, but with
significant means and important interests, and above all with
extreme attentiveness to the security of their immense fortunes
and to the durability of their wellbeing, had, each and every one of
them, heard this threat, this warning.
We have to assume that these elites understood perfectly well that
the warning was accurate, but did not conclude from the evidence,
which had become more and more indisputable over the years,
that they were going to have to pay, and pay dearly, for the Earth’s
turning back on itself. They would have been enlightened enough
to register the warning, but not enlightened enough to share the
results with the public.
On the contrary, we must suppose that they drew two
consequences from the warning, which resulted in the election of
the Tweeter-in-Chief to the White House. “First, yes, we shall have
to pay dearly for this upheaval, but the others are going to pay for
what is broken, certainly not we ourselves; and, secondly, as for
this less and less debatable truth about the New Climatic Regime,
we are going to deny its very existence!”
These two decisions would make it possible to connect three
phenomena:
what since the 1980s has been called “deregulation” or the
“dismantling of the welfare state”; what since the 2000s is known
as “climate-change denial”15; and above all, what for the last 40
years has been a dizzying extension of inequalities.16
If the hypothesis is correct, all this is part of a single phenomenon:
the elites have been so thoroughly convinced that there would be
no future life for everyone that they have decided to get rid of all
the burdens of solidarity as fast as possible – hence deregulation;
they have decided that a sort of gilded fortress would have to be
built for those (a small percentage) who would be able to make it
through – hence the explosión of inequalities17; and they have
decided that, to conceal the crass selfishness of such a flight out of
the shared world, they would have to reject absolutely the threat
at the origin of this headlong flight – hence the denial of climate
change.
To go back to the well-worn metaphor of the Titanic, the ruling
classes understand that the shipwreck is certain; they reserve the
lifeboats for themselves and ask the orchestra to go on playing
lullabies so they can take advantage of the darkness to beat their
retreat before the ship’s increased listing alerts the other classes!18
For a clarifying episode that is not metaphoric in the least: Exxon-
Mobil, in the early 1990s, knowing full well what it was doing,
after publishing excellent scientific articles on the dangers of
climate change, chose to invest massively in frenetic extraction
of oil and at the same time in an equally frenetic campaign to
proclaim the non-existence of the threat.19
These people – whom we can call the obscurantist elites from now
on – understood that, if they wanted to survive in comfort, they
had to stop pretending, even in their dreams, to share the earth
with the rest of the world.
This hypothesis would make it possible to explain how
globalization-plus has become globalization-minus. Whereas until
the 1990s one could (provided that one profited from it) associate
the horizon of modernization with the notions of progress,
emancipation, wealth, comfort, even luxury, and above all
rationality, the rage to deregulate, the explosion of inequalities,
the abandonment of solidarities have gradually associated that
horizon with the notion of an arbitrary decision out of nowhere in
favor of the sole profit of the few. The best of worlds has become
the worst.
Looking down from the ship’s rail, the lower classes, now fully
awakened, see the lifeboats pulling farther and farther away. The
orchestra continues to play “Nearer, my God, to Thee,” but the
music no longer suffices to drown out the cries of rage …
And it is indeed of rage that we must speak if we want to
understand the reaction of defiance and incomprehension in the
face of such a betrayal.
If the elites felt, starting in the 1980s or ’90s, that the party was
over and that they would have to build more gated communities20
so they would no longer have to share with the masses, especially
not the masses “of color” that would soon be on the move
throughout the planet because they were being chased away from
their homes, one can imagine that those left behind also
understood very quickly that if globalization were
tossed aside, then they too would need gated communities.
The reactions on one side led to reactions on the other – both
sides reacting to another much more radical reaction, that of the
Earth, which had stopped absorbing blows and was striking back
with increasing violence.
This overlapping seems irrational only if we forget that we are
dealing with one and the same chain reaction whose origin must
be sought in the Earth’s reaction to our enterprises. We are the
ones who started it – we of the old West, and more specifically
Europe. There are no two ways about it: we have to learn to live
with the consequences of what we have unleashed.
We understand nothing about the terrifying growth in inequalities
or about the “wave of populism” or the “migration crisis” if we do
not understand that these are three different responses, basically
comprehensible if not effective, to the powerful reaction of the
Earth to what globalization has done to it.
In the face of the threat, according to our political fiction, a
decision has been made not to face up to it but to flee. Some glide
into the gilded exile of the 1% – “The super-rich have to be
protected above all else!” – while others cling to secure borders –
“Have pity, let us at least have the guarantee of a stable identity!”
– and still others, the most wretched of all, take the road to exile.
In the final analysis, they are all the “left-behinds of globalization”
(-minus) – which is beginning to lose its power of attraction.
6.
The obscurantist elites, according to this narrative, have taken the
threat seriously; they have concluded that their dominance was
threatened and have decided to dismantle the ideology of a planet
shared by all; they have understood that such an abandonment
could under no circumstances be made public, and consequently
that the scientific knowledge that underlay their whole movement
would have to be obliterated under conditions of the greatest
secrecy – all this in the course of the last 30 or 40 years.
The hypothesis appears implausible: the idea of negation looks too
much like a psychoanalytic interpretation, too much like a
conspiracy theory.21
It is not impossible to document it, however, if we make the
reasonable assumption that people are fairly quick to suspect what
some are seeking to hide from them, and are prepared to act
accordingly.
In the absence of flagrant evidence, the effects themselves are
quite visible. At the moment, the most edifying of these effects is
the epistemological delirium that has taken hold of the public
stage since the election of Donald Trump.
Denegation is not a comfortable situation. To deny in this fashion
is to lie cold-bloodedly, and then to forget that one has lied – even
while constantly remembering the lie after all. This is draining.
We may well wonder, then: what does such a tangle do to the
people who are caught in its net? The answer: it drives them crazy.
And in the first place this “people” that the official commentators
seem suddenly to be discovering. Journalists have seized on the
idea that the populus has become attached to “alternative facts” to
the point of forgetting all forms of rationality.
Commentators set about accusing these good folks of complacency
in their narrow vision, their fears, their inborn suspicion of elites,
their deplorable indifference to the very idea of truth, and
especially their passion for identity, folklore, archaism, and
borders – and on top of all that, for good measure, a condemnable
indifference to the facts.
Whence the success of the expression “alternative reality.” But this
is to forget that this “people” has been coldly betrayed by those
who have given up the idea of actually pursuing the modernization
of the planet with everyone, because they knew, before everyone
else, that such modernization was impossible – precisely for want
of a planet vast enough for their dreams of growth for all.
Before accusing “the people” of no longer believing in anything,
one ought to measure the effect of that overwhelming betrayal on
people’s level of trust. Trust has been abandoned along the
wayside.
No attested knowledge can stand on its own, as we know very well.
Facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common
culture, by institutions that can be trusted, by a more or less
decent public life, by more or less reliable media.22
And people to whom it has never been announced openly
(although they suspect it) that all the efforts to modernize for the
last couple of centuries are at risk of collapsing, that all ideals of
solidarity have been thrown overboard by their own leaders –
these people are expected to have the confidence of a Louis
Pasteur or a Marie Curie in scientific facts!
But the epistemological disaster is just as great among those who
are in charge of carrying out this extraordinary betrayal.
To become convinced of this, it suffices to observe on a daily basis
the chaos that has reigned at the White House since Trump’s
arrival. How can one respect the best-established facts, when one
has to deny the enormity of the threat and wage, without
acknowledging it, a full-scale war against all the others? It is like
cohabiting with the proverbial “elephant in the room,” or with
Ionesco’s rhinoceros. There is nothing more uncomfortable. These
big animals snore, cackle, roar, crush you, and prevent you from
thinking straight. The Oval Office has become a real zoo.
For denegation poisons those who practice it as well as those who
are presumed to be duped by it. (We shall look at the form of
deception peculiar to “Trumpism” later on.)
The only difference, albeit a crucial one, is that the superrich, of
whom Trump is merely the intermediary, have added to their
flight a crime for which there is no atoning: their obsessional
denial of climate change.
Because of this denial, ordinary people have had to cope within a
fog of disinformation, without anyone ever telling them that the
project of modernizing the planet was over and done with, and
that a regime change was inevitable.
Ordinary people already had a general tendency to be skeptical;
now they have been incited, thanks to billions of dollars invested
in disinformation, to be skeptical about one massive fact – the
mutation of the climate.23
The truth is that, if there were to be any hope of dealing with this
fact in time, ordinary people would have had to have confidence in
its solidity very early on, in order to push politicians to act before
it was too late. At a point when the public could have found an
emergency exit, the climate
skeptics stood in their way and denied them access. When the
time comes to judge, this is the crime for which charges will be
brought.24
The public does not fully realize that the issue of climate-change
denial organizes all politics at the present time.25 When
journalists talk about “post-truth” politics, they do so very lightly.
They do not stress the reason why some have decided to keep on
engaging in politics while voluntarily abandoning the link to the
truth that (rightly!) terrified them. Nor do they stress the reason
why ordinary people have decided – and rightly so, in their case
too – not to believe in anything any longer. Given what their
leaders have already tried to make them swallow, it is
understandable that they are suspicious of everything and don’t
want to listen any more.
The reactions of the media prove that the situation is no better,
alas, among those who boast of having remained “rational
thinkers,” who are indignant about the indifference to facts of the
“Tweeter-in-Chief,” or who rail about the stupidity of the ignorant
masses. These “rational” folk continue to believe that facts stand
up all by themselves, without a shared world, without institutions,
without a public life, and that it would suffice to put the ignorant
folk back in an old-style classroom with a blackboard and in-class
exercises, for reason to triumph at last.
But these “rational” sorts are just as caught up as the others in the
tangles of disinformation. They do not see that it is useless to be
indignant that people “believe in alternative facts,” when they
themselves live in an alternative world, a world in which climate
mutation occurs, while it does not in the world of their opponents.
It is not a matter of learning how to repair cognitive deficiencies,
but rather of how to live in the same world, share the same
culture, face up to the same stakes, perceive a landscape that can
be explored in concert.
Here we find the habitual vice of epistemology, which consists in
attributing to intellectual deficits something that is quite simply a
déficit in shared practice.