by Mike O’Brien
This is a conversation I recently had with Dr. Larry Busk, a professor of philosophy who focuses on democracy and climate change, particularly within the sub-fields of critical theory and radical democratic theory. I trust it is not too opaque to an audience that is not familiar with these fields, or with Busk’s work in particular. For those who wish to have some more context in hand while reading/listening, I recommend the following freely accessible works. (Links to more of Busk’s work are included below the transcript).
– Climate X or Climate Jacobin? (with Russell Duvernoy), Radical Philosophy Review 23 (2): 175-200. 2020. (Regarding Mann and Wainwright’s book “Climate Leviathan”)
– Power to the (Right) People: Reply to Critics, Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 36 (1-2): 92-118. 2024. (Regarding Busk’s book “Democracy in Spite of the Demos”)
– What Is “Totalitarian” Today?, Philosophy Today 67 (1): 35-49. 2023. (Regarding Arendt)
– Schmitt’s democratic dialectic: On the limits of democracy as a value, Philosophy and Social Criticism 47 (6): 681-701. 2021. (Regarding Schmitt)
-Beginning of transcript-
MO: So, if you want to just briefly introduce yourself, your role, your position, where you’re at in your research…
LB: Sure. I’m Larry Busk, I’m visiting assistant professor at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.
MO: Great. So, I first came across your work in a paper that you co-authored, that was criticizing Mann and Wainwright’s book “Climate Leviathan”, and I went on to read a bunch of the rest of your work, and it largely circulates around this theme of criticizing the use of “democracy” as a critical concept in radical democratic theory, critical theory… How did you arrive at this area of research, this viewpoint, in your research? I mean, you’re still quite early on in your academic career, so I gather this is something that has carried on quite directly from your doctoral studies…
LB: Yeah, it absolutely has. My first book is really about the most sustained discussion of this theme that you’re talking about. The first book was actually, pretty much, almost verbatim my dissertation project, so you’re quite right that it started during my graduate studies. This idea, it really emerged out of my reading a lot of material, both in more popular forums and in more academic literature, that wanted to, in various ways and to varying degrees, point to popular movements, popular movements like Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter or things like this, as exemplifying the normative and descriptive essence of “the political”- should I explain those terms, “normative” and “descriptive”?
MO: Um… yeah, let’s.
LB: Okay. If I’m being descriptive I’m sort of describing something, I’m telling you the way things are, “hey, this thing is like this, this is what this is”. If I’m being normative, I’m saying “this is the way it ought to be, this is the right way to do things, here is my prescription for how we should proceed”. And so I was reading a lot of accounts that say, you know, “Occupy Wall Street is the essence of ‘the political’: people appearing in public to demand some concrete change on the basis of some grievance that they have”. And so these ideas were circulating, particularly in critical and radical theory, but I always wondered “Okay, so if Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, etc., are properly democratic and political and things we ought to be celebrating because they are properly democratic and properly political, then why not right-wing popular movements? Why not the Proud Boys or Moms for Liberty, or other such groups that do appear in public and do air grievances, and do call into question what they take to be relations of domination and oppression?”. I should be clear, my interest in this does not come from a place of wanting to be sort of “fair”, per se; I don’t come from this. Some people misunderstand me as saying, well, that I want to invite the Proud Boys into our critical democratic theory conferences, and so on and so forth, or I want us to take them seriously in the way that one takes well-given advice seriously. That’s not my concern at all, my concern is more so with the consistency of saying things like, you know, the essence of “the political”, the thing we ought to be doing is encouraging popular movements in the street demanding justice or something like this, when we don’t seem to have that same degree of confidence when people are appearing in the street to say things like “Mass deportation now” or “Your body, my choice” or things like this.
So, what really seems to matter to us more, if we’re thinking about it consistently, I argue, is the content of what people are saying, not so much the fact that they are saying something. So, as I put it in the book, the question really shouldn’t be “How do we give the people a voice?” but “Why do the people speak so wrongly? Why do people believe the things that they believe?”, and not so much… I argue that we should shift from talking about the formal concepts of democracy, like contestation, pluralism, opinion, things like this, and more talk about the content of actual political expression as an object for political critique and analysis. What that means for me, among other things, is I turn back toward a tradition, which was sort of maligned for a long time but is gradually and haphazardly making a comeback these days, which is that of the tradition of ideology critique.
MO: And you, in talking about this question of “Why do the demos speak so badly, why do they reason so badly, why do they deliberate so badly?”, if deliberation is even an activity that we often see, you do acknowledge that this is not just some eternal foible of the people; you acknowledge that this is a very technologically specific and concrete and recent condition, in which the ability of the demos to avail themselves of information and their ability to model their use of that information on useful or salutary modes of discourse is being degraded quite deliberately. So I think, if someone were skimming your work they might think “oh, this is some argument about how the people are never going to be fit”, which it seems like Arendt says something along those lines quite a bit, at least in the excerpts I’ve read of her work in your work, but you seem to be quite apprised and you go to some pains to make clear that this is a historically concrete and technologically concrete problem.
LB: Yeah, there is a very long and vibrant history in political philosophy, from Plato down through the centuries, which is fundamentally anti-democratic in the proper sense of that word, meaning that the great mass of people, usually the lower classes, right, are sort of inherently politically incompetent, either because they’re not intelligent enough or they lack the wherewithal, they lack the resources, they for some reason are basically politically incompetent. Even when you get up into the nineteenth century with more progressively-minded thinkers like John Stuart Mill, who you can find in any textbook of liberalism and of democracy, but he actually thought that more educated and refined people ought to… he believed in universal enfranchisement but he thought that the higher you were up on the social ladder the more votes you should have. So like a doctor should have four votes, and an engineer maybe like three votes, and if you were just a normal working class person, well only one vote for you, because he thought that the condition of the working class was so degraded they couldn’t possible be trusted with political decisions. When you get to the twentieth century, there is an admirable and justified critique of this notion as, essentially, just existing to protect class power. When you boil it down, the arguments from Plato to Mill, and even some in the twenty-first century, the argument is essentially “Well, if we give the people too much power, they will threaten the prerogatives of the ruling class”, right? “They’ll realize that all of this wealth and this property hoarding is not legitimate and take it from me.” And so, at least among radical and critical theorists, there’s been a very sharp move away from this kind of thinking, this kind of elitist thinking. And again, insofar as we’re criticizing Plato or John Stuart Mill for essentially just offering an apologism for inequality with their elitism, that impulse is very admirable. What I think has happened is that there has been in that spirit a sort of over-correction, a move to go too far in the other direction, and basically either deny or ignore the fact that, you know, be it as it may that Plato may have been an elitist, John Stuart Mill may have been an elitist, they’re not talking about nothing; it is not actually the case that because someone is a member of the demos that they have any kind of broad competence when it comes to political matters.
The most salient example I can give of this is climate denialism. Many, many people, not just people who own fossil fuel companies, but ordinary, everyday, working class, middle class, what have you, people, many millions of them, in the United States especially, will tell you that climate change is a myth, it’s a hoax, okay maybe it’s real but I don’t know that it’s caused by humans, or maybe it is but maybe we should start worrying about it in two hundred year, etc., etc., various shades of climate denial, and I don’t think this position reflects some kind of autonomous will of the people, but nor do I think it reflects a fundamental and ahistorical incompetence, I don’t think people deny climate change because they are stupid, I don’t think they deny climate change because they are evil, or something like this. There is a lot of sociological evidence to suggest that climate denialism is a very self-conscious project on the part of certain political actors in our society, and it’s been effective; for lack of a more precise terminology, there’s been a very effective propaganda campaign to inculcate the climate denialist viewpoint into the people, and so in my view that is what we should be talking about, we should be diagnosing this patently false and incredibly dangerous view that climate change is not going to be dangerous any time soon, the process by which people are led to believe that, the process by which people come to believe this false thing, and I think we are very much doing a disservice to both truth and justice if we just categorically deny any talk of false consciousness as outdated and elitist or something like this when, again, someone who does vote will look you in the eye and tell you that they do not believe in climate change. So it’s a question of critiquing Plato’s elitism, critiquing the elitism of political philosophy, while not necessarily denying that, as it happens, as we stand here now in 2025, having this conversation, there are a lot of false beliefs circulating amongst the demos.
There’s a wonderful little scene in the novel “Remains of the Day” by Ishiguro, it also appears in the film version directed by Ismail Merchant, where a member of the nobility is having a conversation with some other aristocrats and they’re arguing about democracy, you know, “what does democracy mean?”, “should we be afraid of it?”, and one person, one of the aristocrats is more democratically inclined, and he says something like “oh, the ordinary person on the street is totally competent to give opinions on politics”, or something like this, and to test this the main aristocrat calls in his butler and they ask this butler a series of questions about the political issues of the day, and the butler is totally befuddled and can say nothing except “I’m sorry, I am not able to be of assistance in these matters”, and the person who is asking these questions takes this as a victory, right, he says “see? this guy doesn’t know anything about politics, and yet we want our future to be in the hands of this guy who doesn’t know anything. Okay, okay, that’ll do…”. Now, of course we should be, you know, outraged at this scenario insofar as they’re content to just humiliate this poor man, and of course we should view the scene in the context of a society which permits, right, this division between these landed aristocrats who have nothing but time to read the newspapers, and so on and so forth, and this butler who, you know, is probably barely literate and has no incentive and no opportunity to learn anything about politics, we should criticize all of these things, but none of these things alter the fact that the butler does not know, he does not know the answers to these question, he is not able to be helpful, as he says. And so it’s a matter of, I think, offering a critique of the disparity in education and perspective, as opposed to just denying the disparity in education and perspective.
MO: I suppose, too, that there could be at least two ways of looking at the role of someone like the butler in a political system, where on the one hand they should be enfranchised to avail themselves of political goods, to serve their interests, to realize their rights, but a more, say, republican view might be that, well, really the most important aspect is them serving the polity. They’re two sides of the same coin, rights and responsibilities, but you could see how if you thought a political project had an important goal to reach, then the polity could have put upon them certain responsibilities that require skill, education, and you get an element of that when we talk about the need for, you know, more civics, so that people can do their jobs properly as citizens.
LB: Yeah, no, I would be completely comfortable with a political program that wanted to make sure that someone like this butler could educate themselves, or be educated or something like this. This is often times the conversation about the actually existing demos versus some ideal demos that goes in this direction, “okay, it seems that what we need to do is properly educate everyone such that we are competent to engage in political discussion or something like this, political deliberation”, and I don’t have an objection to that as such, my concern is really with the journey from point A to point B, you know. This is particularly when you have elements of a demos, who would be the actually empirically existing demos, who would be opposed to that kind of project of education taking place. Does that make sense?
MO: It does, because in the abstract we can say “well, we should have education”, but then we say “well, okay, which committees should decide on the content of that, which officials decide whether they’re going to sign on to that curriculum, which parts of the demos pick out the building in which you are trying to educate people about their own interests”… once you get into the concrete demos it all gets very messy.
LB: Yeah. Democratic theory has a very fraught and ambivalent relationship with Rousseau, but I would argue that most or all democratic theory always is forced to return to this Rousseauian moment where Rousseau infamously says that people ought to be forced to be free, that people are not able to or are not recognizing the general will, they ought to be educated as to their own interests, as you say, and this kind of language, this sort of disposition is, again, to a lot of democratic theory totally anathema. But I would argue, and I argue in my work, that they are always compelled to, at least implicitly, endorse this kind of Rousseauian model.
MO: It’s been a while since I read Rousseau, but I seem to recall that he had this very sort of ahistorical picture of the proper place of humanity, and that the human restrictions that humans lived under was kind of this immoral, unnatural imposition. And so, from a twenty-first century perspective with more understanding about the evolutionary history of the shape of human culture, you could say “Rousseau, we were never there, there’s no ‘there’ there to return to”, and so I think in that sense these sort of pre historically-informed, or very selectively historically informed view of what freedom is proper to humanity, and what cultural enmeshment is proper to humanity, can really hamper a sort of clear-eyed view of what workable prospects there are for future arrangements… You see now even talk that humanity might need to move to more eusocial direction, saying that just the needs of bare survival require a more efficient organization of our material bases of survival. And then, if you thought the other stuff leans in the direction of totalitarianism, eusociality sort of leaves all the plurality and openness at the wayside.
LB: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know if you wan to pivot to talking about climate change…
MO: I’m quite happy to follow whichever way you’d like to go, this is kind of your show…
LB: I guess I brought it up earlier when I brought up climate denialism, but I’m working on this paper now, going back to democratic theory, I’m working on this paper now called “Is Democratic Theory Carbon-Competent?”. This notion of carbon-competence was introduced in a paper last year or the year before, in Nature Communications, and basically it’s what it sounds like: if someone is carbon-competent they are sort of broadly aware of the basic mechanism that causes climate change and what the effects… broadly, remember, very broadly… what the effects are likely to be. And this paper finds that most adults… I don’t know if their sample was limited to the United States or not, I’ll have to go back and check… but most adults in whatever sample they were using demonstrate low carbon competence, a sort of basic lack of understanding of the dynamics of climate change, I don’t mean in very sophisticated scientific terms, I just mean the basics of what’s happening. And I want to argue in this paper that contemporary democratic theory, and I’m no longer just focusing on the sort of radical domains, I’m focusing on mainstream, liberal ,constitutional, deliberative and what’s called “epistemic” democracy, that these traditions seem to, I want to claim in this paper, operate in isolation from the very stark and very deadly reality facing us with regard to anthropogenic climate change. I want to frame things around, and tell me if this makes sense to you, I want to frame things around an analogy or a thought experiment, where you should imagine that there’s, let’s say, seven people in a raft going down a river, and they come to a fork in the river, they can either go left or go right, and only a couple of people in the boat have studied the map. And two of the seven, they happen to know that if they go right in the raft they’re going to fall off a cliff to their likely deaths, and if they go left it’ll be a difficult journey but they should be fine at the end of it. However, five of the seven people in the raft, those who have not studied the map, they elect to go right. And the two people who have studied the map are screaming at them “No! No! We can’t go right, you’re going to send us off the cliff! We need to go left, for the love of all that is good and holy, go left!”. But the democratic procedure, whatever it looks like, has determined “well, five trumps two, so we’re going right”. And the question is, you know, do those two people who have studied the map, do they have a right to commandeer the boat, to commandeer the raft anti-democratically, not democratically, and steer the ship to the left? In other words, right, what is more important here, the survival of not just those two who studied the map but the survival of everyone, or the fact that democratic… that justice conceived in democratic terms has been served? And my claim is that most democratic theory would force you to say that the raft ought to go right, or it implicitly assumes that everyone on the raft is educated and has the wherewithal to have already studied and already know to go left, which is empirically not the case.
MO: So, this is very much in line with… in your reply to critics I remember there was three positions that you assigned your critics, where they said “well, the democracy has spoken”, or “well, a real democracy wouldn’t do that”, or somewhere in the middle… I think it’s still an open option to die a steadfast democrat, knowing that you’re going to your death but it just wouldn’t do to not follow the procedure. It sort of calls to mind… like, in Hobbes there’s this foundational relationship between protection and obedience, right, and you only obey the sovereign so long as the sovereign can protect you, and once it’s clear that the sovereign can’t protect you, all bets are off, you can go shopping for a new sovereign, you can revolt, whatever. And that same ethic also extends to a subject is not obligated to go peacefully to his own death if condemned. So even Hobbes, not really the absolutist that most people paint him as, but, even Hobbes would say no, you don’t have to go along to get along if that means walking into a noose. So you don’t even have to be a democrat, even just good principles of commonwealth governance brought down to the level of a lifeboat, there’s a defensible tradition against accepting the democratic consensus in that point.
LB: Yes, and there’s among other things a very serious misstep in contemporary democratic theory which says something to the effect that it’s either an inherently… it’s an inherently flawed idea, either epistemologically or morally, to say “well, I know what the common good is, and I know that these consequences will be ruinous if we don’t pursue this path”. That’s either flawed because no one could possibly know the truth of what consequences would be ruinous and which ones won’t, or a presumption that one set of consequences are worse than another morally, I’m somehow imposing my worldview on you or something like this, this is a very common talking point in democratic theory which, to get back to this paper I’m working on, right, seems to implicitly be climate-denialist itself, right, it seems to mirror this right-wing talking point that “Yeah, you have all this science on your side that says that climate change is going to be disastrous, but maybe it’s not, who knows? They can’t even predict the weather this week and you’re telling us they can predict the weather in 2100”, again this kind of pluralist mentality, this mentality that says “There is no one right worldview, and there is no one right description of the world”. That, to me, would seem to be a great comfort to a climate denialist.
MO: It’s certainly useful to the people who are giving them their facts…
LB: Exactly, yes. And so it’s troubling situation to me when democratic theory is, at this level, indistinguishable from a climate denialist discourse.
MO: It sort of reminds me of that line near the end of “No Country For Old Men”, where Chigurh says “If following a rule has brought you here, what’s the value of the rule?”.
LB: Yes, yes, ha ha… Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguru, we got it all, political theory, literature…
MO: It’s… Yeah… there’s sort of an analog to this flight from the risk of being a tyrant in… I’ve read a lot in animal welfare, and a lot of that is animal rights, and there’s a use of formalism there in the rights language, in the rights architecture, that doesn’t seem to do any work, but it seems to have respectability and traction, and it also seems to honour the objects of study in a way that perhaps doesn’t really work with the sorts of beings that they are but feels like a nice thing to do for them.
LB: Mm-hmm, I think I know what you mean, but say more…
MO: So, for instance let’s treat dogs like they could participate in citizenship meaningfully, which is more like a noblesse oblige than trying to accurately understand the sorts of beings they are and make a fitting place for them.
LB: If I understand you right, there’s this impulse to anthropomorphize the animal in order to make it the subject of rights.
MO: That’s one track, another track is sort of taking the reins off of our civic imaginations, “Maybe, once we’ve put enough miles between ourselves and the terrible current situation, all these possibilities would open up”, and I think that there’s that flight to boundless formal possibility, which shows up also in the sort of things that you’re criticizing, where there’s so much horror at the prospect of imposing something on a minority opinion, of becoming a tyrant. And this is something that struck me quite a bit in your citations of Arendt, were she’s basically collapsing any coercive power into this monolith of totalitarianism, regardless of content, and then you have radical democrats who say “We should never entertain dreams of imposing opinion or imposing fact, even at the cost of losing the world”, and that just seems to me apolitical in an important sense, it’s about theory but it’s not really about politics in any substantive way that I understand it.
LB: Yeah, yes. I… another thought that this occasions in me, speaking of this Arendtian radical democratic notion of the sort of unpredictability of politics, you know, there’s this… they love this notion that the essence of politics is the eruption of some new idea, or the eruption of some new contestation that’s never been thought of before, that creates a whole new vocabulary or something like this, and really we ought to locate politics there, and one of the great harms of totalitarianism is that it stifles this, apparently. And then, yeah, they extend that to any sort of strong confidence in one’s particular world view, right, if you think that you have it basically figured out, how politics works, how capitalism works, something like this, it could extend that to say “well, if you think you’ve really figured out how the climate works…”, that this represents an over-confidence that stifles the eruption of “the political”. But that very strongly, again, resembles a lot of more sophisticated climate denialist discourse, which says “Yeah, I know, I see all these numbers with regard to carbon emissions and parts per million of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and so on, but how do you know we’re not going to invent some technology next year that will save us? Humans are industrious and creative, and for all we know in a year or two we’ll create some vacuum that can suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. You don’t know. Have faith in technology.”, something like this, “Have faith in some new thing that no one’s ever thought of before that’ll save us.” This is basically the climate change policy of the Democratic Party in the US, “We’ll keep burning fossil fuels in the hope that technology will come along in the next five or ten years that will just let us keep burning fossil fuels, and we’ll subsidize people working on research to develop technology to allow us to keep burning fossil fuels”. That, coupled with, you know… I’ve done a lot of reading and research lately on degrowth, and critics of degrowth, people who want to sort of maintain “green growth”, they’ll also say things like this, they’ll also say “Well, we could maintain economic growth while decarbonizing our economy if we invent some new good or service that has never been thought of before, and that will allow us to continue growing our economy, even if we are totally decarbonizing it and shrinking greenhouse gas emissions. So, never mind your strong confidence in evidence and science, we have the boundless power of imagination”…
MO: And those sorts of future vistas can also be tied into an ethic of… usually associated with “effective altruism”, but that’s a large basket… but this idea that we’re going to have trillions of people, and if we stop this technological progress now we’re not going to have the opportunity to provide a net-positive welfare to these trillions of people. Which, again, is a flight from the fairly hard limits of the current situation.
LB: Now this is the absolute nadir of this discourse, like we need to have more people, because more people on Earth means more opportunities to come up with the technological fix that will enable us to have more people. Yeah, I don’t know if that’s a gamble I’d be willing to take. The analogy would be, back to my life raft situation, if you imagined all those seven people on the raft, like, “Well, we don’t want to go left, and going right [Author’s note: directions have been switched to match the original description of this scenario] will kill us, what if we just added more people to the raft that might develop some technology that would allow us to keep going right but not fall off the cliff somehow. Let’s add more people to this raft as we’re going off the cliff, because who knows, more people… if each of us has a baby, one of those babies might be the saviour.”
MO: And we can just bracket out things like gestation periods.
LB: Maybe the technology will allow us to have one month pregnancies.
MO: Let’s not throw away our future for a lack of imagination… So, in this scenario, the minority that has read the map would seem to only have recourse to force, or… I suppose force could also be construed in terms of non-veridical manipulative discursive practices… so, would the upshot of this be sort of an argument for emergency-measure short-cutting of majoritarianism in the face of obvious peril?
LB: Yes. I think it’s the case that whatever happens in any eventuality, say in twenty or thirty years, and this Mann and Wainwright are quite right about, there’s going to have to be some kind of state of exception, there’s going to have to be some kind of emergency politics declared, because with the destabilizations that climate change is alarmingly likely to bring in the next few decades I fail to see how a government like that of the United States is going to manage this emergency, manage this crisis, without suspending basic constitutional rights and civic safeguards and things like this. So I don’t really think the choice is between a state of exception that suspends basic liberal rights or not, I think the choice is between what form that’s going to take, or maybe better yet what content that’s going to have. I guess, to get back to the raft analogy, you’d have to imagine that the choice is that the minority who has studied the map uses force and coerces the other five people into going left, or as they are going down the cliff the raft begins to disintegrate, to break apart, and in order to maintain order a different minority in the raft needs to assert control and take power non-democratically. In other words, this suspension of the bromides of the broke constitutionalist democracy, I don’t believe they’re going to survive anyway, so I don’t believe it’s a question of “Do we resort to coercion or force, or not?”, I think it’s going to happen, it’s just a question of “Who’s going to do it, and what are they going to do with it?”.
MO: I suppose we could imagine an adjustment where there’s a few rafts on this river, where you have the option of leaving your raft, although most rafts are not taking on any boarders, or at least being able to observe the actions of a majority of other rafts and see which way they’re going, although that presumes that they have functioning communities of map readers in those other rafts as well, from which you can draw useful examples. I was thinking of… I had mentioned in our back-and-forth earlier that I had studied Schmitt in my own grad studies, and I think a lot of people read his early work on parliamentarism and the nature of democracy, things like that, the nature of the political, but his later work, particularly Nomos of the Earth, which is quite woolly, it gets into a lot of… I mean, all of Schmitt is woolly, he loves his arcane maritime terms… but one really useful take-away in Nomos is this concept of Grossraum, which often gets misinterpreted as just this sort of imperial zone of influence, when really it’s a technological, infrastructural re-ordering of the territorial divisions of the earth, and that to me seems like a more accurate picture of the power distribution that we face in the twenty-first century, where it’s not about this nation state and that nation state and its representative governments marshalling their resources within their own borders to accomplish this, that or the other project, it’s rather Russian gas lines stretching out over dozens of countries, it’s trans-national corporations, it’s most importantly climate change effects that don’t respect national borders. And so I think that sort of… I mean, understanding yes the nation-state still has currency, still has traction, still is the starting point for any other project, but I think that re-ordering of our thinking to say that where things are happening is not in a nationally territorially-divided plane, and I’m not sure a lot of the democratic theory has caught up to the fact that we’re not enfranchised in the systems that have the most influence over us.
LB: That’s absolutely right.
MO: Even if we live in well-functioning democracies within their national silos.
LB: Yeah… just to give a concrete example of this, I was on a panel at a conference recently, and the panellist next to me was giving a paper on foreign exchange students, and arguing that, well, because foreign exchange students, while they’re studying in their host country, are subject to the laws of that country, they ought to have temporary voting rights. So in other words, if I go study in France as a foreign exchange student, while I’m there during my course of study I ought to have a right to vote in France because the laws in France affect me for that period of time. This is sometimes called the “all affected principle”, if you’re affected by a law you ought to have some say in constituting that law. And I asked this person… “Well, isn’t it the case that greenhouse gas emissions anywhere in the world affect the entire world, and on that basis shouldn’t everyone be voting in everyone’s elections? So, shouldn’t I be voting, and you, and all of us be voting in every country’s elections? Especially in those that have a high carbon rate, a high carbon emissions rate.” And there was just no accounting for this, this was just not considered, the idea that, you know, Brazil’s decision to cut down the rainforest or not has world-historical implications, and so who is in charge in Brazil matters a lot to you and me, more than most of us probably realize. And yet most Americans can barely follow their own politics, let alone Brazil’s politics. But yeah, to connect this back to what you were saying about Schmitt and territory, this is, again, something that Mann and Wainwright were correct about, this kind of sovereignty that will emerge in the face of global climate disaster is going to have to be a global sovereign, a “planetary sovereign” as they call it. Of course, they argue at the end of the book that that shouldn’t happen, let’s avoid that, but I don’t know realistically that one can avoid that, because of the reasons that you mentioned.
MO: Yeah… it also, if you believe that politics is constituted by a relation of enmity, enmity understood as a situation in which A wants a future that would preclude B having a future that it vitally wants, or that it thinks is… a future with elements that it existentially cannot dispense with, then the sort of existential threats globally from climate change creates a politics of enmity that washes over borders and over continents, and isn’t, importantly, driven by war; I think that’s one big adjustment to something like Schmitt’s martial picture that is necessary in the era of climate change is realizing that your country can be destroyed by another by accident…
LB: It’s interesting because I read Schmitt as wanting to make a distinction between something like a legitimate enemy or a legitimate adversary… I’m going to have to revisit some texts to give you the exact language, but I think somewhere he refers to something like a “total enemy” or an “absolute enemy”, and one of the things that’s interesting about Schmitt is that when he criticizes Marxism, for example, when he criticizes socialist or communist politics, his criticism is never that the image that they give of the world is false, or anything like that; his criticism is that a Marxist politics turns one class, the bourgeoisie, into an absolute enemy that must be destroyed, and then once the working class overtakes the bourgeoisie and destroys them there is no more class antagonism, and you’ve attained a kind of enemy-less polity, which Schmitt thinks… it’s unclear if thinks that that’s impossible, if he thinks that that’s just a bad idea, if it’s just going to be boring if there’s no enemies, I don’t know about that, but he thinks that for some reason there’s a problem with just destroying your enemy and not having an enemy, whereas what he seems to want, what he seems to prefer, is “Okay, I’m German, France is my enemy, I don’t want to destroy France, I want France to be there because I need to define myself in terms of France as my enemy, and we might fight at some point, there’s always this threat that we’re going to destroy each other, but we shouldn’t do that, we should keep ourselves as enemies locked in this contest, or a contest between Grosraume.” And… in another way, and this is a weird parallel, I think that a lot of democratic theory has inadvertently, or sometime advertently in the case of someone like Chantal Mouffe, a lot of democratic theory has taken this up too, this notion that it would somehow be deleterious in some way or another, it would be a negative result if somehow we resolved all conflicts and we were all in the same team, that would somehow be bad… I don’t want to say “fetishizing”, but somehow aggrandizing political conflict and dissensus as a sort of good in and of itself. And that argument doesn’t really make sense to me in any respect, but I think it becomes especially problematic in the face of climate change.
MO: And it does smack of that valuing politics as this sort of performative human excellence instead of something that helps us save the world. That was something that really struck me, reading a bunch of your citations of Arendt, is that the picture of politics, at least in her earlier stuff, the picture of politics you get is some performance that belongs in the same category as oratory and dance and theatre, this Athenian spectacle, and not as something that solves our vital problems and brings justice into the world. And so it seems to me you’re using the same word, but that is not the same thing, and importing that conceptual framework into a modern politics where we do seem to understand politics, if you’re not a really radical democrat, as a solution to vital problems, is just not a useful perspective. It’s interesting… it’s interesting if it’s interesting, but it seems to be a categorically different thing than a tool for addressing collective problems.
LB: Yes, I think you’re absolutely right, and this is something that’s been sort of in the back of my head for some years now, my thoughts are still quite inchoate, but it does seem to me that maybe one of the roots of all of the theoretical problems that I’m trying to diagnose and work through in my work, is precisely this, this misapprehension of what politics or “the political” is, what it means. So certainly this emphasis on just the performance itself, on the sort of inherent value of debate or dissensus or appearing in public to demand something, something like this, which I do not understand why that’s just inherently good, but even beyond that a lot of this theoretical milieu, especially Arendt, they seem to regard politics as basically what happens when a collection of individuals get together and express some opinion that they have. And I think that, just to connect it back to climate change again, I don’t think that what’s happening when someone who has… let’s just say, to make it simple, someone who has stock in Exxon Mobil appears in politics and says “Well, it’s my opinion that we shouldn’t do anything about climate change”, when that person appears in public and says that, and then a different person who has no stake in Exxon Mobil and is broadly morally concerned about the survival of the planet, so to speak, the survival of humans on the planet anyway, when that person appears in public and says “No, really we ought to do something about climate change”, what’s happening there is not two people engaged in a difference of opinion, both trying to persuade the other using deliberative blah-blah-blah, that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is this person who has a stock in Exxon Mobil, this person has a material interest that they’re trying to defend, and this other person has no such limited and circumspect material interest, and so they don’t see any advantage, they don’t see any material benefit from the continued existence of Exxon Mobil, they have a seemingly better sense of their short-term and long-term interest. And so what’s happening there is a struggle, what’s happening there is a struggle over resources, over material goods, and also a struggle over the future, right, a struggle over how we’re going to construct a future such that I can keep having some semblance of a meaningful and enjoyable life in the future, me and everyone. As opposed to “Well, if we do something about climate change then the value of my stock in Exxon is going to go down, so I don’t want to do that”. It’s not a difference of opinion, it’s a struggle over resources, and there’s a real lack of appreciation of this reality in democratic theory; you’d think that every opinion arrived at was arrived at considering all the consequences rationally, as opposed to this self-interested game of “I have privileges that I desperately want to keep, and you want to take those away, and so I’m going to oppose you politically”.
MO: Well, that and in a certain sense it’s not interesting in the way that talking about pluralistic, antagonistic discourse is interesting, but maybe “interesting” is for the weekends and Monday to Friday we should be saving the world.
LB: Ha ha… yes, exactly.
MO: I asked you in our emails, too, how you personally have sort of ridden these two tracks, of your moral concerns, which come through quite clearly in your work, it’s not a mystery which side of the fence you’re on here, and the more intellectual pursuit that you also put a hell of a lot of work into. My own experience when I doing grad studies was trying to make these things enforce each other, trying to make the moral concerns drive the intellectual study, trying to make the intellectual upshots from the research make some headway on the moral concerns, and I sort of arrived at a point where they’re both good but I don’t think there’s some sort of magic key in either one to help the other. Maybe in ten years I’ll change my mind on that. But as someone who is a labourer in an academic context, and also as a political labourer, civic labourer, someone who engages in these things because of a sense of public good, and because you personally don’t want to live in a hellscape, have you had a personal experience of trying to make those two things sit together, a change in your mindset of how those two things relate to each other.
LB: Yeah… that’s a rather difficult question, a very interesting question. One thing that comes to my mind immediately is… let me say two things here. One is, in a certain sense, and in a certain valence… I’m going to say this and then I will qualify it very carefully… in a certain valence I think that the moral or evaluative dimension of this always comes first and is always really sort of in the driver’s seat, if for no other reason than… and this is a very Nietzschean point to make, but I think he’s right on this one… I cannot explain to you why I value the truth as opposed to falsity, using just the truth. Does that make sense? Why prefer to know the truth rather than just be ignorant or live under an illusion? I think we can’t answer that question except by some moral or evaluative category. So even if you’re dealing with a theorist, or a scientist for that matter, who has the utmost and strictest sense of “I am just a scientist or a scholar, I am not putting my own value judgments in what I’m doing”, they’re still abiding by the value judgment that truth is better than falsity, which is not… that’s a value judgment, right? That’s what it is. So, in that respect, the political or moral element is always first. Having said that, I think that once we have made that leap, then the question becomes “Okay, what is actually going to further the realization of the moral or political principles that I hold and want to see enacted?”. And then once you’re sort of orienting your question in that way, what is actually going to help and eventuate the kinds of changes and the kinds of shifts that one wants to see? Then, I think, the question of “Okay, what is actually true?” becomes of paramount importance. Again, just to tie everything back to climate change, if I want to know what works in terms of rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, then I need to know a lot of stuff, I need to know a lot of facts, I need to know a lot of sciency stuff, I need to read studies and things like this. It’s not actually helpful to just rely on your moral intuitions without those moral intuitions being backed up by empirical evidence, not because empirical evidence is somehow just better than moral intuition in some way, but because my moral intuitions are probably not going to have a chance of being realized, the thing that I would like to see realized, expressed in my moral intuitions is not going to actually happen if I don’t know the facts, right? I don’t know if that makes sense, or if I’ve missed the force of your question…
MO: No, I think… to be fair, it is a big question that requires a certain distance from your own take on this at difference points in your life and in your career, and so it’s… it never has a definite answer, I think. But it’s helpful, and I think that point that your intuition isn’t enough, if you take it upon yourself to pursue moral projects in the world and not just your own private virtues or whatever… yeah, sometimes you just gotta learn calculus, because you can’t get there without information or without aptitudes that you don’t already have…
LB: I have one more anecdote from an academic conference and then I should probably get going, but just to concretize what I was saying a minute ago a little bit… I gave a conference talk once that oriented, that gestured towards some kind of very rationalist climate politics, right, relying on various intellectual categories against the idea of pluralism and dissensus and these sorts of things, and someone in the audience asked a critical question and said that “Well, I don’t think that reason is going to convince people to care about climate change, I think what you need is aesthetic and affective images, you need an image of a whale washed up on the beach dead, that will rouse people’s sympathies to caring about climate change”. And my response was, and still is, without denying that image are powerful, without denying that, just the image of the whale washed up on the beach tells me nothing about climate change. I could see the whale washed up on the beach and think that whale was killed by political correctness, or high taxes, or something. Nothing about the whale dead on the beach tells me that burning fossil fuels leads to a greenhouse effect, right, there’s nothing between the whale and this reality. So, just emotion and just affect… not just supplemented by but guided by rational reason and information is worth less than nothing.
MO: Mm-hmm, although at the same time you wouldn’t want to cede the field of pure emotion and aesthetics to the bad guys.
LB: This is also true. I’m not against emotion and aesthetics, I just think they need to be grounded in something.
MO: I think my own ecological commitments are largely from just being in nature as a child and having an affective connection to that…
LB: Absolutely…
MO: …and the rationalization of that came in after, but it had to be grounded in just a brute fact.
LB: I wouldn’t care about climate change, even if I understood all of it I wouldn’t care about it, unless I had some moral impulse that this ought to continue because on some level it’s good.
MO: Great. Well, this has been wonderful, thanks for agreeing to do this.
LB: Of course, yeah, it was my pleasure. Thanks so much for inviting me.
-End of transcript-
For further reading, consult Busk’s Philpapers page: https://philpeople.org/profiles/larry-alan-busk
His two books are:
-Democracy in Spite of the Demos (2020) https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786615251
-The Right-Wing Mirror of Critical Theory (2023) https://rowman.com/isbn/9781666929645
His doctoral thesis, which mirrors much of his first book, can be read at:
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/d83f8ba0-591d-4940-b60f-27505954df7b/content