Please Do Not Cite. Extractivism and the Neoliberal Self: Canada and The

Draft version: Please do not cite. Extractivism and the neoliberal self: Canada and the challenge of climate change Scott Staring University Partnership Centre, Georgian College Introduction When the New Democratic Party held its annual convention in Edmonton this April, two news items received broad media play. The first was the not-so-surprising decision to dump Thomas Mulcair as party leader. But it was a second decision that really grabbed the headlines: Party delegates passed a resolution to consider adopting principles from the controversial Leap Manifesto, which calls for a significant restructuring of the economy and the phasing out of fossil fuels. The NDP’s non-committal agreement to merely discuss the manifesto elicited outrage and scorn from some commentators. The National Post’s Michael Den Tandt derided it as “an addled, cockamamie vision like something out of Orwell” (Den Tandt, 2016). One-time NDP leadership candidate, James Laxer, mocked the document as an unrealistic, elite scheme that “reeks of downtown Toronto”(Laxer, 2016). Meanwhile the cover of Maclean’s magazine featured a picture of the manifesto’s leading advocates, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis, with a gargantuan headline reading “How to Kill the NDP” (2016). What lay behind this reaction to the manifesto? Why the fury over a document that some have described as a “middle-of-the-road” response to a crisis that threatens the very future of our planet? The answer I believe has to do with the challenge it poses to our very identity as modern Canadians. Over the past several decades our nation, like many others, has undergone a series of far-reaching neoliberal reforms. To understand the full effects of this neoliberalization, I argue, we must look beyond its economic effects and examine how it has shaped our very conception of self. Drawing on the thought of political philosopher George Grant, I identify the neoliberal self with a particular understanding of human agency, one which sees freedom as the ability to manipulate a world that has no value except for that which we impose upon it. It is this notion of selfhood, I suggest, that is threatened by challenges to the neoliberal status quo and that accounts for the harsh reaction to these challenges. Klein on the dual origins of the climate crisis In her recent book This Changes Everything, Leap Manifesto co-author, Naomi Klein (2014), traces our current climate crisis to two distinct sets of practices and beliefs. The first of these is capitalism, which constitutes the central target of her book. More particularly, Klein aims her attack at the era of neoliberal capitalism that gained its 1 foothold in the age of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and dug in firmly during the decades of WTO-led trade liberalization that followed. Neoliberalism, Klein argues, propagates the belief that we “are nothing but selfish, greedy, self-gratification machines” (62), and treats the earth as so much raw fuel to be gobbled up. As such it remains one of the chief obstacles to meaningful action against climate change. The second phenomenon that Klein targets in her analysis is what she calls “extractivism”: a view of nature that treats it as a mere resource lying ready for us to exploit and consume (161-187). She traces the origins of this attitude back to the seventeenth-century revolution in thought that brought about the modern natural sciences. While Klein recognizes that the scientific revolution has brought us untold benefits, she also believes that it lies behind a redefinition of nature as something to be probed, manipulated and used up for our own selfish ends. In Klein’s account the early-modern natural sciences and neoliberalism are informed by complementary teachings about humankind and nature. The scientific revolution re-describes nature as something to be manipulated and controlled by our species; neoliberalism understands ours as a species meant to dominate and control nature for its own selfish purposes. The complementarity that her writing points to is, I think, both illuminating and hard to deny. At the same time, I would suggest that Klein’s account actually underestimates the depth of the interconnection between the modern sciences and neoliberalism. Klein, as it were, limits her efforts to describing the affinity between these two phenomena, but does not try to explain how this affinity came about. More specifically—to anticipate the argument put forward in this paper—she does not reflect on the possibility that the modern sciences and neoliberalism are linked through some shared common origin. For Grant, on the other hand, this possibility is an ongoing theme of reflection. His writings continually return to an exploration of what he sees as the common historical origins of modern science and modern capitalism. To speak very generally, Grant views both phenomena as being rooted in what can be described as a new conception of human individuality and human freedom. In his view, any attempt to understand modern extractivism or neoliberalism must come to terms with the emergence of this modern self. The scientific revolution and the modern subject For Grant, one of our first glimpses of the modern self comes to us in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon, whose account of the scientific method he views as seminal to the rise of the natural sciences. He shares this view of Bacon, not incidentally, with Klein who describes him as the “patron saint of the new sciences” (170). Both Grant and Klein point to the unmistakable violence behind Bacon’s account of the experimental setting. Klein, for her part, cites a passage from Bacon’s 1623 work, De Augmentis Scientiarum where he speaks about “hound[ing] nature in her wanderings,” and “penetrating into [her] holes and corners” in the pursuit of truth. (as cited in Klein, 170). Grant, on the other hand, makes repeated references to Bacon’s account of his method as “putting nature to the question,” i.e., torturing nature for its secrets (and torture, as Grant notes, is a practice Bacon had direct experience of as the one-time attorney general of England [1969, 20; 1995, 135]). Both Klein and Grant recognize Bacon’s violent formulations as antecedents of the widespread view today that nature is something lacking inherent worth, a mere 2 resource that we are free to plunder. For Grant, however, Bacon’s apothegms also suggest new modes of understanding and agency which ultimately underpin a new account of the human self. Bacon’s scientific writings frame knowledge as the product of manipulation and control, something pursued through acting on the world. Grant describes this modern account of knowledge as a species of “making,” and sees in it an intimate connection with modern technology (which derives etymologically from the Greek roots for craft or art [techne], and reason [logos]) (1986, 12). In Bacon’s portrait, Grant tells us, nature has no worth or meaning independent of our acting upon it. Nature, in a word, has been redefined as an “object.” Reflecting on the word’s Latin root (iacere: to throw), Grant notes that an object is a “thing that has been thrown in front of [ob] us. Thrown in front of us, it lies there at our disposal.” (2009, 183; see also 1986, 32). The “objective” science of nature which Bacon helped to found, Grant tells us, constituted a direct repudiation of the Aristotelian teleological conception of nature that had been woven into the political and theological traditions of the Middle Ages (1969, 20; 2000, 147-148; see also 1974, 16-17). For Bacon, nature had no natural purpose or end to fulfill: humans were free to impose their own ends upon nature. In assuming the power to define nature’s ends, Grant insists, humans also assumed a new understanding of their own species. The corollary of nature as “object,” he notes, was the idea of the human being as “subject.” The modern subject, who in Bacon’s description stands apart from the world and controls it through his or her knowing-making, becomes the very “foundation and measure of all that is” (1998, 224). As one commentator puts it, the human being emerges from Bacon’s writings as “a needy self that must make its own provisions to the point of making its own world” (Faulkner 1993, 88)1 Nor is there anything, such as a natural moral law, that might constrain the subject’s ability to act on the world in this way. Instead, the human being has been reconstituted, to use Grant’s phrase, as an “Archimedean freedom outside of nature” (1969, 32). Science and (neo)liberalism It is this conception of the modern subject that suggests the strongest link between the new scientific perspective and contemporary neoliberalism. Grant claims that modern classical liberalism shares with the natural sciences the same basic presupposition that human beings’ “essence is their freedom.” (1978, 144). 2 Neoliberalism, in his view, is but the ideologically purified expression of classical liberalism. By exploring what he has 1 Faulkner argues that Bacon understood very clearly that what the new sciences were re- describing not just nature, but how our species stood in relationship to nature, and that this entailed a radical new conception of the human being as an “individual”—a conception that Faulkner claims Bacon traced out in a manner that was more consistent, and “in many ways more revealing than what is often supposed the locus classicus of individualism of Thomas Hobbes” (87). 2 “From the very beginnings of modern thought,” Grant writes, “the new natural science and the new moral science developed together in mutual interdependence so that the fundamental assumptions of each were formulated in the light of the other.

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