‘Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime’ by Bruno Latour (Polity, 2017) – Reviewed by Robert M. Ellis

Why are we not facing Gaia? Why do we avoid facing up to the conditions of the earth-system on which we depend? On any other critical issue, such as a major threat of war, we would long ago have mobilised vast resources to deal with the problem. But when it comes to the earth we are stuck. In this highly relevant series of eight transcribed lectures, the French sociologist and philosopher of science Bruno Latour offers some intriguing and profound answers to these questions. These answers are often implicitly those of the Middle Way, because their central message is that facing Gaia is facing uncertainty, ambiguity, provisionality and incremental justification. We have got ourselves into this mess, he argues, by adopting what amount to absolute beliefs about ‘Nature’, whether positive or negative, and substituting these for an engagement with Gaia. Gaia, as identified by James Lovelock, is neither a goddess nor a set of inanimate causal relationships, but something in between: something that we can – most disturbingly – affect for ourselves rather than assume to be independent and stable.

Latour begins with a brilliant analysis of the underlying reasons that climate change deniers have managed to get away with so much. The key to understanding the dynamic of the climate change ‘debate’ lies in the unacknowledged values (which Latour usually calls ‘politics’) on each side. The climate scientists and their supporters, on the one hand, tend to appeal to the ‘facts’, which are indeed very well supported, but are presented in isolation from the values that have animated those researchers. Those values are those of commitment to thorough research and enquiry and of overcoming limited assumptions, and they also do strongly imply the requirement to act on those facts (just as “there’s a baby on the seat!” implies that you should not sit on the baby). But these values are not usually presented along with the facts. The facts themselves, not being absolute, are then disputed by climate change deniers, who are able to maintain a degree of a credibility largely because the discussion is limited to the ‘facts’, and their own values are not subjected to scrutiny in comparison to genuinely scientific ones. Rather values are seen as a purely personal matter beyond enquiry. In a context where the ‘facts’ are the products of highly specialised research and thus have to be taken on trust by most people, doubt can easily be cast on them for many people when that fragile trust is called into question. The discussion of values, which would enable us to relate the process of scientific enquiry more closely to our own experience, is off-limits according to the set of values that scientific training itself tends to inculcate. Thus climate science contributes to its own undermining. Climate scientists are caught in a Catch-22. If they emphasise the authority of the facts, they will be seen as dogmatic, whereas if they discuss method and accept fallibility, the “open debate” that follows is taken to give them only one contesting position among others.

In relation to the Middle Way, the best response to this situation is one that stresses incrementality. The scientific justification is a matter of degree, but nonetheless overwhelmingly powerful precisely because of that. Many people simply do not understand that a position becomes more, not less, justified through provisionality and incrementality, but there is no substitute for them doing so. Without this, people tend to just flip between absolutism and relativism, taking any limitation of certainty as a signal for relativism – where every view is as good as every other view. Latour does not quite talk explicitly in those terms, but he does talk in terms that are implicitly compatible with them. In his own distinctive language, he does also make a number of very interesting and helpful observations and suggestions, both about what sorts of processes feed polarised absolutisation in relation to climate change, and about how that absolutisation can be avoided.

His observations about how this situation has arisen, and indeed of why our response to climate change is so inadequate, depend very much on the kind of even-handedness that is so important to Middle Way thinking. Even-handedness involves treating negative absolutes as no better justified than positive ones, since they are just as divorced from experiential justification as each other. Latour shows that even-handedness in his account of the “anti-religion” of nature. This amounts to ‘scientific naturalism’ as I tend to use the term, meaning a dogmatic interpretation of science not to be confused on any account with science as a whole. But almost any terminology is fraught here, as there are some thinkers (Mark Johnson, for instance) who use the term ‘scientific naturalism’ to mean something like the Middle Way. In reading Latour it’s very important to understand his uses of terminology before jumping to conclusions. He uses ‘religion’ to mean something like what I would call absolutisation, so that ‘anti-religion’ is negative absolutisation: absolute beliefs accompanied by an implicit assumption that they are not absolute because they are opposed to positive absolutes. He uses ‘secular’ to mean not the opposite but the Middle Way alternative. His language for the Middle Way is thus that of an ‘earthbound’, ‘secular’ approach beginning with a full acknowledgement of our specific context and values.

The problem with this ‘anti-religion’ is not its use of scientific method (which Latour seems to implicitly support, though this really needs more attention in his book). Rather it is the adoption of many of the same assumptions as the ‘religion’ it rejects when presenting the conclusions of its research. Latour points out that the beliefs of ‘anti-religion’ resemble those of ‘religion’ in being external, universal and indisputable: the ‘facts’ are taken to be definitive, whether they have been revealed by God or by scientific investigation. Even the process of becoming a scientist has parallels to religious conversion and initiation. Latour has a strong point to make here as long as we interpret it as being one about the absolutist interpretation of science. There could, however, be much more critical anticipation of the likely objections – for instance, that scientific culture embodies provisionality in a way that religious culture does not. Such objections could be readily answered by ensuring that we stay focused on the naturalistic interpretation of science rather than scientific culture as a whole. Science itself may be practised in the spirit of the Middle Way, that is with provisionality – and it is when it is not that dogmatic naturalism becomes such a problem.

That naturalistic interpretation particularly comes to the fore when it comes to the interpretation of Gaia. Latour argues that James Lovelock’s subtly balanced account of Gaia has been badly misinterpreted almost from the start: on the one hand by New Age treatment of Gaia as a supernatural entity with her own agency, and on the other by scientific rejection of Gaia as an anthropomorphic projection onto what is believed to be an inanimate system of causes. However, it is the very complexity of Gaia, along with the way that she includes us humans and is changed by our responses, that makes the question of Gaia’s agency a highly ambiguous one. Latour pleads for a perspective on agency that respects that complexity by putting it in a ‘metamorphic’ zone. This involves the avoidance of both absolutised freewill and absolutised determinism. Lovelock crucially avoids treating Gaia either as a simple whole or as a mere set of parts that can be engineered: instead we have to recognise that our inability to grasp the complexity of the whole may make it seem at times like an agent of the kind we take ourselves to be. It (or she) is both an organism and an environment for that organism, with each shaping the other.

The ‘religious’ and ‘anti-religious’ perspectives are indeed most strongly divided on this issue – namely whether Gaia is a result of ‘design’ or of ‘chance’. But these two alternatives are only superficially opposed to each other. Both are simplifications of that interactive, metamorphic process that occurs within a complex system. It is not a matter of a ready-made design being first represented in the mind of a designer and then realised, and more than it is the case that no ‘intentions’ are applied in the way Gaia develops. Rather, as any artist knows, materials and intentions continually shape each other, just as organisms shape their environments.

In developing this account of the ways that the ‘anti-religion’ of nature has been counter-dependent on ‘religion’, Latour also adds an Apocalyptic element. This amounts to the idea that the widespread modern tendency to neglect the earth’s conditions within time is attributable to an implicit belief that we are outside time. Time has, he claims, finished for us, which is the basis of our false sense of security about the temporally changing conditions around us. If this was all he claimed, it could have a psychological and neuroscientific basis, for instance in Iain McGilchrist’s observations of the ways that dominant left-hemisphere assumptions about time differ from right hemisphere ones. However, following Eric Voegelin, Latour seems to attribute this tendency more specifically to an interpretation of Apocalyptic beliefs, which he believes the ‘anti-religious’ have adopted unconsciously from the ‘religious’, but turned around, so that the immanent world around us is transcendentalised. This offers an interesting observation of a process of ideological development, but Latour seems to place too much explanatory emphasis on it as the basis of the whole of our attitudes to Gaia. The contents of our beliefs are indications of their absolutisation, but we need to beware the trap of taking particular absolutisations as explaining the phenomenon of absolutisation as a whole.

In the final two lectures, Latour also adds some more practically focused observations that can form the basis of suggestions for how we can face Gaia more fully and avoid polarised assumptions about her. One of these involves the full recognition of conflict (or ‘war’ as he calls it) depending on our differing relative positions, and the avoidance of premature absolute positions that assume we already have a basis of peace. If we don’t recognise the genuineness of conflict, ‘wars’ become mere ‘police actions’, asserting an absolute authority rather than recognising the absence of any such authority and the need for negotiation between perspectives. This advice fits Latour’s advice to climate scientists earlier in the book to make their values explicit, saying more about where they are coming from and what they want rather than assuming the God-like position of ‘Nature’.
In his final lecture, Latour tells of a dramatised performance he witnessed in which the different perspectives on climate change and how to respond to it were represented by different groups of students. Surprisingly, though, the viewpoints represented were not just those of states, but also those of ‘The Oceans’, ‘The Atmosphere’, and other aspects of the earth that would not normally be considered to have political interests worth representing. Latour suggests that it is vital that we do attempt to represent such interests, not just in the abstract but by employing people to plead on their behalf. It seems that there are conditions of very great importance that we are nevertheless very likely to neglect if they are not represented in this way. These are specific conditions that need to be taken account of in all negotiations, not just taken to be part of a standpoint of ‘Nature’ that we cannot actually inhabit sufficiently.

Overall, Latour offers an extremely stimulating and timely philosophical engagement with Gaia. Yes, we need action rather than just philosophy, but we also need philosophy like this, that requires us to think beyond the kinds of assumptions we have previously made at the expense of Gaia. In the end, then, this kind of philosophy is potentially highly practical in its effects: but only if it is more effectively related to a framework of practical thinking and action. That is, of course, where I think the Middle Way comes in. The Middle Way, if treated more explicitly here, could be a tool of communication, making it clearer where Latour is coming from, showing its relationship to other applications of Middle Way thought, and avoiding the extremely likely misinterpretations it may produce.

Latour’s book has a number of limitations, all of which I would relate to this lack of explicit exploration of the more general Middle Way. One of these, which I have already mentioned in relation to his ideas about the role of Apocalyptic beliefs, is the tendency to put a strained amount of explanatory emphasis on particular absolute beliefs for revealing why we neglect Gaia so much. It is not that these absolute beliefs are not likely to have played a major role, just that they need to be seen as metonyms for a wider phenomenon that may take many specific forms in different contexts. I find it very hard to believe that everyone who neglects Gaia does so because of their interpretation of Apocalyptic beliefs – but Latour does not even seem to ask what the status of his positive generalisation is, let alone what other factors may be involved. As with many other philosophers, his critical observations are much stronger than his general theories.

That failure to acknowledge the wider context implied by his positive explanatory theories is closely related to another limitation, which is the total neglect of psychology and neuroscience. Here I would guess that we are dealing with an issue of background specialisation, and that Latour has probably been trained in sociological, historical, and (continental) philosophical approaches rather than psychological ones. Nevertheless, his work is necessarily synthetic, and cannot remain adequate whilst failing to address one whole well-developed angle on the issues he discusses. In this case, that could well include psychological and neuroscientific accounts of absolutisation, bias, social conformity, and many other related issues. Similarly, there is no acknowledgement at all that Buddhism might offer another well-developed approach to these issues of ‘religion’ and ‘anti-religion’.

Trying to speak from my own starting-point and acknowledge it, it also seems from my standpoint that Latour’s approach reflects both the strengths and the limitations of the ‘Continental’ tradition of Western philosophy. Its strength is particular its theoretical creativity (which arises from a capacity to synthesise), here shown particularly in the way it engages philosophical reflection with history and sociology. Its weakness, however, is a lack of critical rigour of the kind one tends to find excessively displayed in Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy. Where positive theory is offered, there is little attempt to anticipate all the ways that that theory may not be universal, and thus either broaden the theory or hedge it appropriately. Without this, it is easy to slip into a speculative mode that is just as limited as the implicit conventionalism of much analytic philosophy. This lack of critical testing against a potentially universal perspective may also be related to the lack of engagement with scientific method in this book. I would have liked much more positive appreciation of the ways in which scientific method (particularly in conjunction with systems theory) can help us to face Gaia.

Perhaps the limitation that readers are most likely to find in this book, though, is another one I have already mentioned – the specific uses of terms in it. These uses of terms are very different not only from my own, but also very different from those typically used by those inclined either to scientific naturalism or to religious perspectives. There is a very big danger that many people who pick up this book will simply misunderstand it, dismiss it, and put it down again, unless they come from the very specific intellectual milieu from which its author comes, where the use of terms will be shared. However, this problem with the use of terms is a wider one shared by anyone who tries to approach the Middle Way from whatever standpoint. We have a lot of terms in Western intellectual tradition that can be used to represent dogmatic positions and also can be used to represent Middle Way type positions: terms like religion, metaphysics, epistemology, nature, globe, secularity, war, politics, ethics, and science (along with all their derivatives). Thus every Middle Way writer, if they are to engage with existing discourse to any extent at all, has to choose through stipulation which terms are to represent helpful things and which unhelpful things. Is ‘religion’, for instance, to be stipulated as dogmatic or as experiential? That depends very much on your background assumptions.

Perhaps Latour’s use of ‘religion’ to mean ‘absolutisation’ or ‘dogma’ is not that unusual, but I suspect anyone from a more ‘Anglo-Saxon’ background will be just as confused as I was initially by his use of ‘epistemology’ to mean ‘dogmatic epistemological assumptions’. ‘Epistemology’, for me, is a source of liberation from dogma through focus on judgement and the extent of its justification! He also seems to use ‘metaphysics’ (and also ‘cosmology’) to just mean ‘standpoint’ or ‘weltanschaung’, obviously in contrast to my own use of it to mean absolutisation. ‘Globe’ is also a negative word for Latour, meaning something like ‘Absolute God’s eye view standpoint’.

The key point when reading this, then, is not to be confused or scandalised by such language, but to try to work out its intended meaning. The overall practical focus is, after all, clear in this book. Latour wants us to face Gaia, and to question the ways that we have been turning our backs on Gaia. He is not doing this with the directness of Extinction Rebellion, blocking streets to gain government attention, but nevertheless in a way that in the long-term I consider equally important. There is no point in merely protesting, if in the end we continue making the same mistakes based on the same assumptions. Nor, on the other hand, is he ineffectually preaching our conformity to the ‘balance of Nature’.

That is why the best philosophy is totally practical. The quest to face Gaia from all sorts of standpoints, all of them fully acknowledged as our own, and to disentangle Gaia from ‘Nature’, needs to continue, at least until a much wider proportion of the population understands how to do so.