In the 1830s, at the beginning of the industrial age, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to America to study customs and the political system there. A central question animates him: how is it, the devil, that democracy holds in America while it continues to perish in Europe? His answer is surprising: thanks to the “boundless continent” and the “extraordinary” American soil. Because there, there is no need to fight for limited resources, no inequality of property, as in old Europe – the rich nature allows “all” to have access to property and causes the appearance of a real equality of conditions.
But precisely when Tocqueville asked himself, five years later, “why great revolutions would become rare”, he could answer that it was because of the number “of these ardent and restless small landowners whom the equality of conditions constantly increased. “. In love with their property, the latter refuse any undertaking that could endanger them. Individualist complacency sets in, causing Tocqueville to fear that modern citizens “will finally allow themselves to be possessed so well by a cowardly love of present enjoyments, that the interest of their own future and that of their descendants will disappear, and that they would rather follow the course of their destiny limply than make a sudden and energetic effort to straighten it out if necessary.
Almost two centuries ago, Tocqueville already identified the pillars of the social imagination of modernity. First, an “extractor” relationship with nature, considered as a resource, outside of us, to be exploited endlessly. Then, a narcissistic and incapacitating individualism based on the small property of the great number. In the wake of the last part of the report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), focusing on these two pillars is absolutely vital. If climate change is indeed caused by man, it is not caused by just any man, but by modern man. Tackling them head on and seriously means tackling them in the same way the type of man who gave birth to them: ourselves. Unfortunately, no organism enthusiastically wishes to destroy what it is.
The climatic test
We must see, in this sense, that the relationship we have with climatic upheavals — understood in the broad sense of the systematic destruction of nature, and not only in the restricted sense of global warming — is not akin to a bad habit, for example that of excessive consumption of fossil fuels (which, however, the IPCC report suggests). We are not smokers who could avoid cancer (climate disasters) by quitting smoking (by cutting fossil fuels).
No, we are already suffering from a cancer with multiple metastases (the modern social imagination in its relationship to nature); only, we try to heal the leg (by freeing ourselves from fossil fuels) and the heart (through good individual actions such as recycling or public transport) without worrying about the rest (overconsumption, individualism, productivism, the ideology of growth, etc.). So we could slow down the necrosis, make it more comfortable for our anxiety, but it would still persist, insidiously, without our noticing that what we really need at this stage is a new body: a new social imaginary.
The tragedy lies in the magnitude of the positive elements that are entangled in our unhealthy relationship with nature. The great struggles for social, material and economic justice since the industrial revolution, for example, have been largely dependent on economic growth. According to the “liberal pact”, which the French philosopher Pierre Charbonnier diagnoses in an admirable work of lucidity published in 2020 (abundance and freedomParis, La Découverte), it was “intensive, then extensive growth” which was the “vehicle of political emancipation by opening up the horizon of possibilities”.
Indeed, and very clearly during the Glorious Thirty, sustained economic growth made it possible to lift an incredible proportion of the inhabitants of Western countries out of poverty — often at the cost, however, of inhuman exploitation of land and foreign bodies. Thanks to it, we have been able to achieve the great social advances which, today, with good reason, make us proud, and to reach this standard of living so comfortable that we all unconsciously cherish, as much critics as apologists. But if “the freedom of the moderns is linked to the affordances of the earth [et] to the possibilities opened up by “development” […]it is now suspended from the climatic test”.
Go to root
The good news ? Social imaginaries are not fixed for all eternity; If history teaches us one thing, it is the contingency of the different forms of human life. We have, after all, passed from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, from the Middle Ages to Modernity. The bad ? These changes generally take place over a long period of time, in a diffuse and underground way. Fortunately, the imperative for action is felt more and more strongly, and we know that disasters, in general, are effective drivers of change.
One thing is certain, the change will have to be radical by going to the sources of what we have become: our work, our days and our thoughts can no longer be punctuated by the unrestrained consumption and excessive growth of our modern individualism. Above all, we can no longer indulge in what could be called the “Tesla syndrome”: promoting the electric car, while persisting in building these SUVs which are still only used to be stuffed with an unreasonable amount of equipment. — or act only easily on the tree while neglecting the forest.
Social imaginaries, like life itself, seek to perpetuate and reproduce themselves. They can only be defeated by other imaginaries, other vocabularies, other ways of understanding and organizing our world: other utopias. To create the latter is the task incumbent on our artists, our philosophers, our thinkers and our poets. This is indeed the task that, rather, falls to all of us: to think up a social imaginary that does not cost us the Earth.