immanence

I’ve long been receptive to the idea that we need a spiritual, or even a religious, movement to address the climate crisis. Of course, I define both “spiritual” and “religious” quite broadly, and am well aware of how both terms have been shaped within histories that are Eurocentric and dominated by monotheistic, Christian, and more recently Protestant assumptions about what constitutes religion (and “spirit”) and what does not. As a (sometime) scholar of religion and spirituality, I avoid those assumptions.

Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation movement is, in my view, a spiritual movement. When it gets critiqued on empirical grounds, as it has been recently — and when it gets defended on those same grounds — the spiritual impulse underlying the movement might get lost. Clarifying what that impulse is can be helpful when one is trying to disentangle the arguments between the movement and its critics.

Earlier this week, Open Democracy published a lengthy article entitled “The faulty science, doomism, and flawed conclusions of Deep Adaptation,” co-written by a University of York physics PhD student, a Brown University climate and development researcher, and a graduate of Columbia University. (I mention those credentials because, in this business, credentials seems relevant, and because their critique of Bendell implicitly critiques his credentials.)

I recently wrote about how the documentary Planet of the Humans serves as a way for some environmentalists (specifically, some within the Degrowth movement) to position themselves against others (Green New Dealers, among other pragmatists), with the former presenting the others as “shallow” sellouts to pragmatic and instrumental forms of action. We find something similar in the debate between Bendell and the Open Democracy writers. But this time the “spiritual” or “religious” dimension is more directly relevant and is useful for us to think about.

Much of the conflict between Bendell and the three co-authors hinges on the question of whether “societal collapse” is a plausible or an inevitable result of current trends. Accepting its inevitability, the trio of critics argues, “undermines the environmental movement and could lead to harmful political decisions, overwhelming grief, and fading resolve for decisive action.” Their argument focuses on scientific claims about Arctic sea ice melt, methane release, climate “tipping points” and “tipping cascades,” and “nonlinearity” in climatic and ecological systems. They conclude that Deep Adaptationists make use of some of the same strategies as climate denialists and other “science skeptics,” but simply align them in the opposite direction.

But their take-home message is that Deep Adaptationists’ premise that societal collapse is inevitable is a harmful premise. “If societal collapse were truly inevitable,” they write, “it would make no sense to practice mass civil disobedience against governments that would shortly fall apart. Instead, we in the climate movement should view societal collapse as a distinct possibility among a number of long-term outcomes — and work as hard as possible to prevent it by transforming our societies.”

In defense of their own action as part of movements like Extinction Rebellion, the authors label Deep Adaptation “doomist” and “defeatist,” and claim that it “distracts” us, “demotivates us,” “delegitimises us,” “obscures our long-term vision and planning,” and “is incompatible with environmental and social justice.”

In his response, called a “Letter to Deep Adaptation Advocate Volunteers about Misrepresentation of the Agenda and Movement,” written one day after the Open Democracy piece, Bendell defends himself and the movement from the “dozens of misrepresentations and baseless speculations” presented by the three authors. He presents several misrepresentations and corrects them, and his rejoinder deserves to be read for that.

The subtext, however, is that his critics’ approach is not deep enough. Elsewhere, Bendell writes about the governing ideology of our world as an “ideology of escape,” which he breaks down acronymically into a series of points (entitlement, surety/certainty, control, autonomy, progress, exceptionalism) that have been called other things before — for instance, the ideology of Progress, anthropocentric human dominationism, colonial capitalism, et al.

Essentially, though, what he means is escape from the facts that stare us in the face: that we humans are vulnerable, and that the world we’ve created is unsustainable. We blind ourselves to the impacts of the world we’ve created — the impacts upon other humans (who aren’t as well situated as us) and upon myriad nonhumans — so as to keep intact the comforting illusion that we can go on forever like this. We cannot: sooner or later, it will come to an end. But more importantly, it is morally and ethically unsustainable.

In response, Bendell advocates that we drop these ideological blinders and face reality. His critics, he avers, are not quite prepared to do that. They reach instead for one thing or another — the facts about climate change, the possibility of averting disaster, the need to organize and march in the streets, and so on — as a way to deny the reality of a disheartened and disillusioned world.

In all of this, Deep Adaptation is completely in line with many religious and spiritual movements that have come before it, which all start from a kind of primary disillusionment or metanoia, a spiritual turning-away that is also a turning-to. Buddhism is exemplary here in its insistence that we have it all wrong: that we suffer because we grasp at things that cannot possibly be grasped. They are not graspables. Our mistake is ontological; it is a mistake of not seeing things for what they are.

But early Christians, Gnostics, and various other religious and spiritual movements began from a decisive rejection of the standards — beliefs, values, practices, and ideologies — of the society that surrounded them. Philosophy since Plato’s cave has advocated a similar method of “disillusioning” from what isn’t true. Spiritual work often begins from a recognition that something isn’t working, or isn’t satisfying, and that one’s life must change. Likewise, Deep Adaptation begins from a shedding of the comforting illusions — the ideology of e-s-c-a-p-e — that hold mainstream society together.

The problem arises when this spiritual move — a movement of the self in relation to one’s surrounding world — becomes reliant on an empirical, and therefore empirically falsifiable, argument. In the case of Deep Adaptation, that’s the argument that societal collapse is inevitable. To join the Positive Deep Adaptation Facebook group, you must affirm your belief “that social breakdown due to climate disruption is highly likely (or underway)” and that you “wish to prepare better both emotionally & practically.”

One could simply reject this hinge point altogether and say that we cannot know for sure whether societal collapse is inevitable, probable, or even just possible. That’s not what matters. The issue is whether the values and practices that hold this particular society together are worth holding up, or if they need to be abandoned and replaced by another set. If the latter is true, then the most important work one can do is to face that fact, to come to terms with it emotionally and spiritually, and to work to overcome those values and practices and replace them with more appropriate ones. That’s a matter of cultivation, and in that respect the Deep Adaptation movement is, I think, correct — it takes time and internal effort, in supportive communities.

If Deep Adaptation aims for something like that, then its (and Bendell’s) response to empirical critics need not be as defensive as it sounds. Defensiveness is the first sign that a spiritual movement is calcifying.

As Bendell points out in his response, millions are already going hungry due to climate related changes, diseases (like Covid-19) are already spreading rapidly, and there really are a lot of life-or-death matters we can anticipate becoming more prevalent around the world in the very near future. The question remains what to do. But it also remains: what kind of attitude should we take toward these things? And how do we cultivate that attitude, an attitude that will help us and others deal with the (frightening enough) reality that we truly face?