WHO IS THOMAS STOCKMANN?

HARRISON STETLER

WHO IS THOMAS STOCKMANN?

There is a seductive yet misleading version of the history of environmentalism. It recalls the exploits of an enlightened few and their eforts to alert an a-ecological society to the reality of its embeddedness within a tissue of delicate ecosystems and biological processes. As honest history, however, this narrative simplifes a tragic and potentially useful past.

WHO IS THOMAS STOCKMANN? Te notion of an “environmental crisis” is not new, and has experienced many ruptures over the past several centuries. For instance, this notion has contended with competing conceptions of the relationship between the social and the environmental, because our defnition of the “environment” can only be in crisis so long as it threatens the social realm of human relations. In “Modernity’s Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Refexivity,” the historians Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher therefore prefer to speak of our environmental “refexivity,” and how modern history has long been “saturated with multifaceted refections and profound worries over human impacts on the climate.” Te crucial phrase here is multifaceted refections. While a dominant language of environmentalism today is that of anxiety, this language (as it has been previously) also continues to be one of cautious opportunity and outright enthusiasm. Te history of environmentalism has a place for jeremiads, from transcendental romanticization of untarnished nature to committed activists and cautionary earth scientists. But the story must also accommodate the guarded excitement with which many thinkers imagined a dominant human position in the natural world. Likewise, our understanding of the “environment” has ebbed and fowed over the years. Before it was in crisis, however, it was an opportunity.

By the late 18 th century––against the backdrop of European colonization, globalizing capitalism, an emerging economy predicated on expanding human needs, and an exchange of ideas about political liberty, legitimate government, and equality— many Europeans had become obsessed with humanity’s imminent preponderance over nature. In 1778, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Bufon, the natural historian, remarked that “the entire face of the earth now bears the imprint of man’s power.” Ironically, Fressoz and Locher write, this was the moment to rejoice that we might one day “alter the infuence of [our] own climate, thus setting the temperature that suits [us] best.” Humanity’s newfound position in the natural world could, according to Bufon, lead to our creative emancipation from the constraints of stagnation and subsistence. But the environmental history of civilization had other warnings, Bufon

added; this was also a story of man’s unthinking domination of nature, not its reasoned exploitation. For Bufon and his contemporaries, the decadence and decay of the Ottoman Empire (compared to the newfound strength of Western Europe) refected man’s regrettable tendency to dominate, rather than rationally exploit, a pliant natural world. What happened to the Edenic forests described in Genesis? Millennia after millennia of crude domination by despotic regimes—the Assyrians, Babylonians, the Pharaohs—had eroded the ecological foundations of civilized human life.

Tis all was absurd, but Bufon was participating in heated debates about what many thought was an existential threat to European life: the steady disappearance of the continent’s forests. Te risks of deforestation were diverse. One conception, which emphasized the importance of forests for humidity and rainfall, allowed easy contrasts to be drawn between the supposedly arid and backwards Middle East and the temperate climate of Western Europe, which provided the necessary conditions for legitimate states and cultural fourishing. In the 18 th century, one of inter-imperial confict, a steady supply of wood resources was essential to construct the massive warships protecting transatlantic European empires. Indeed, many of the frst civil administrations of these new states were forest registries, designed to oversee and regulate the exploitation of wood resources, as lumber was an essential source of energy. Te existence of hidden troves of fossilized energy, namely coal, and their rapid exploitation starting at the end of the

18 th century could be considered the frst green energy “transition.”

Tis detour is not meant to relativize contemporary forms of environmental “refexivity.” Te belief that a supposed Middle Eastern decline was initially an “environmental” crisis linked to deforestation and soil erosion had much to do with a European appetite for colonial expansion. But it should not lead to skepticism of real threats to organized human life posed by our three century-old experiment with fossil fuels. Rather, this history forces us to consider that contemporary environmental refexivities are embedded in political history; “environmentalist” ideas were woven into an emerging science of modern political life.

WHO IS THOMAS STOCKMANN? To be sure, it’s anachronistic to describe Bufon as a “democrat.” Te world of 1788, the year that Bufon died, was sociologically and intellectually closer to that of Tomas Aquinas than to our own. In fact, it’s possible to read some proto-environmental refections in Aquinas’s unfnished treatise on the nature of royalty, intended as a gift to the king of Cyprus. What were the inconvenient truths that the well-intentioned monarch of the High Middle Ages should consider? Te monarch must, Aquinas warned, “choose a place suitable for the construction of a city. It seems that this means, frst and foremost, clean air. Efectively, civil life is founded on natural life, which itself is preserved by clean air.”

But Bufon’s aristocratic world quickly turned into the sulphurous and revolutionary one described by Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocque-

ville. Across Eric Hobsbawm’s “long 19 th century,” an agrarian, feudal society gave way to an industrial one, in which an axiologically neutral state expressed the sovereignty of all (male) citizens, equal by right and before the law. Te gears of modern history, according to Hobsbawm, were churned by a “double revolution” that redefned political and social life. Te Industrial Revolution steamrolled local economies and agglomerated a single world capitalist market. What the combustion engine did to the traditional economy, the French Revolution would do to old political institutions and ideas: abolish absolutism and extend legal equality to men, all the while destroying the temporal power of religion in its way.

“Environmentalism” grew out of and was thus woven into new principles of democratic self-governance and a developing sociology of human needs. Te emancipation of the modern subject requires his protection from the pathologies of social life: unemployment, economic misery, and deprivation. Te ability to self-govern and harmonize one’s own autonomy with the autonomy of others, the cornerstone of modern pluralism, requires society’s unprecedented mobilization of the natural world. But this mobilization is dangerous: to what degree can the planet sustain our political ambitions?

Edward Bellamy provides a convincing case for the new confguration of the social and the environmental that emerged over the “long 19 th century.” Tough largely forgotten today after an early death in 1898, Bellamy was a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era in American history. One could argue that the jumping-of point of those decades of reform—bringing labor law regulations, progressive taxation, anti-trust law, and environmental regulations, before culminating in the New Deal of 1930s with the development of an American welfare state—was the 1888 publication of Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward, 2000-1887. One of the best-selling American novels of the century, it galvanized a generation of young reformers. Upon its publication, for instance, hundreds of “Bellamy Clubs” formed, uniting local workers, political organizers, and liberal professionals to discuss the democratization and rationalization of the industrial economy.

Written as a Socratic dialogue, Looking Backward is a masterpiece of sociology and moral philosophy about everything from the organization of economic production and education to the conditions for individual fourishing. In the story, Julian West, a well-of Bostonian of the late 19 th century, wakes up after a sleepless night in his futuristic hometown. Te year is 2000. Doctor Leete, who now lives in West’s

WHO IS THOMAS STOCKMANN? former home, explains the underpinnings of this new society. Te social inequalities that West knew, or ignored, in his day defed the formal political equality of the classical liberal state. Te transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial one, monopolized by massive corporations, had solidifed into modern feudalism. West tells Leete that if he had dreamed of the future, he would have predicted a “pile of rubble” as the only imaginable outcome of his century’s “social question.” Fortunately, the wave of labor agitation and unrest that Leete recounts culminated not in a civil war, but in the nationalization of the economic institutions of the country. Boston now resembles a unifed social organism. West tours the department stores and new cultural centers where citizens spend their universal credits on the fruits of industrial abundance.

We’ve lost our taste for utopian literature, which is probably why we dismiss Looking Backward. And that Bellamy compares the élan of the “industrial army” of 2000 Boston to the Prussian military doesn’t help his case for contemporary readers. But once we take of our Huxley-Orwell lenses, Bellamy’s novel expresses the fundamental moral principles of what the 20 th century would eventually know as social democracy: economic life is collective, not individual; political rights and liberties are

insufcient without economic and social ones; extremes of inequality erode societies from within.

Bellamy is often critiqued for grounding a vision of democracy in unthinking abundance and endless production. Tis is an opportunistic and shallow reading. Bellamy’s thought is innovative precisely because he articulated this vision—which is still largely our own, though we’ve strayed from his egalitarian fervor—while aware of its environmental risks. Looking Backward was a response to the social problem of modern society. As a journalist in Massachusetts, Bellamy took stock of the environmental implications of the Industrial Revolution; he described pollution desecrating rivers, smog hanging over mill towns, and regretted the fracturing of nature by a web of railroads. Echoing the worry about deforestation, he urged legal protections and federal regulation of forests. Bellamy realized that the fate of the social and environmental were intertwined. He believed egalitarian institutions within society and a rational, sustainable mastery of the natural world could reconcile them. Tis is still the framework behind visions such as the Green New Deal, as well as other honest, democratic solutions to the global warming crisis.

Nevertheless, if you asked anyone in the 19 th century what should have been done about the “environmental crisis,” you would have gotten a blank stare. Tere were, of course, the particular concerns that would eventually make up our understanding of the environment, from resource anxiety to fears of the black smog hanging over European and American factory towns. We even owe the earliest theories of the greenhouse gas efect to 19 th century scientists. But there was no all-encompassing sense of anxiety that is encapsulated in the phrase today. Tis is also because the emergence of our contemporary forms of environmental “refexivity” contended with and displaced other ways of imagining space, human needs, and their relationship to the democratic revolution.

William Morris, the English writer, anarchist, and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, was Bellamy’s most trenchant critic. News from Nowhere, Morris’s novel-length reply to Bellamy published in 1890, describes a pastoral utopia in which political liberation and democratic self-rule are rooted in communities modeled on medieval village life. William Guest, Morris’s protagonist, is horrifed by the anomie and flth of 19 th century London, describing the city’s new underground as a “vapour-bath of hurried and discontented humanity.” Guest wakes up to a world of liberated individuals engaging in small, open societies grounded in a moral econ-

WHO IS THOMAS STOCKMANN? omy of altruism, gifts, and sharing. Te archetypal fgure of this futuristic leap-to-the-past is the artisan, and Morris’s book could be read as a swan song for the independent craftsman’s extinction before the advance of the machine and factory. Te artisan the modern subject par excellence, Morris argued most clearly in his 1877 lecture “Te Decorative Arts.” Te ability to create functional beauty out of nature is, according to Morris, the origin of a democratic existence. By molding nature to one’s needs and tastes, work is tantamount to the creative mastery of one’s environment. If Bellamy’s democratic vision is of a promise redeemed thanks to a leap into the future––the extension of democratic institutions to a society’s economic organization—then Morris writes of an idyll irrevocably betrayed and recovered by resurrecting a reimagined past. Te Industrial Revolution is not the harbinger of political modernity; it is the agent of its erosion and self-destruction. Te extension of the machine and the crowding of mass societies in mega-cities combine to instill a sense of vertigo, uprooting individuals from their own lives, preventing them from achieving the artisan’s equanimous autonomy. Morris’s idea of a fragile modern milieu is unrecognizable in our contemporary understanding of the environment. Tis is why Morris is important today. We Bellamyites sufer from a shrunken conception of human needs. Our failure to articulate a positive idea of attachment and roots, as Morris did through his fantasy of an artisan’s democracy emerging from the dulling uniformity of industrial life, is a crucial element of the contemporary crisis in democratic politics. To be sure, Morris’s vision is not foreign. While he was a staunch, if peculiar, modernist, the tragedy is that his vision survives today as blood-and-soil nationalism, which sells a bastardized fantasy of rootedness as moral authority against creeping relativism, as well as racial and cultural homogeneity against the reality of multiculturalism. It is too early to tell if the arc of history might still slouch toward some happy synthesis of Julian West and William Guest’s dreams. For now, at least, the tragic odyssey of another obscure literary character of the 1880s seems a more appropriate allegory for our broad environmental crisis. Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, which premiered in Oslo in 1883, tells the story of Tomas Stockmann, a doctor in a spa town in fn-de-siècle Norway. Upon discovering that a polluted spring close to a network of mine shafts threatens the water supply of the town’s new hospital, Stockmann resolves to alert the townspeople and ensure the necessary repairs. “Te whole Bath establishment is a whited, poisoned sepulcher,” Stockmann cries, “the gravest possible danger to the public health!

All that nastiness up at Molledal, all that stinking flth, is infecting the water in the conduit-pipes leading to the reservoir; and the same cursed, flthy poison oozes out on the shore too…” U ltimately, Stockmann’s faith in liberal reform is quashed. His brother, the town’s mayor, leads the opposition and denies the impending public health disaster by bribing and intimidating journalists into silence. Te play ends as Stockmann descends into delirium, dreaming of returning to the northern reaches of Norway, where the life of an authentic individual, free from the mediocrity of the masses, is still possible. In a bout of proto-fascist misanthropy, he shouts:

What does the destruction of a community matter, if it lives on lies?

It ought to be raised to the ground. I tell you—All who live by lies ought to be exterminated like vermin! You will be infecting the whole country; you will bring about such a state of things that the whole country will deserve to be ruined. And if things come to that pass, I shall say from the bottom of my heart: let the whole country perish, let all these people be exterminated!

Seeping out of the woodwork of an edifce shot through with unrealized promises, Stockmann’s cry is the nihilism that might still engulf us all.

AMANDA BA 11

KEA DE BURETEL 17

EMMA JAMES 18

SOPHIE KOVEL 23, 24

VIVIAN MELLON 9, 56

ISABELLA NORRIS 5, 35

RACHEL SHERR 11, 49

DANIELLE STOLZ 44, 47, 48, 53, 54, 59

SAM WILCOX 27, 38, 41