Category Archives: Climate Change

Steering past the eco-crisis, one balanced judgement at a time

A Review of ‘Regenesis’ by George Monbiot (Allan Lane, 2022)

A combination of groundedness, breadth of awareness, balance and a sense of urgency is required to address the highly complex, critical and contested issues around the multiple eco-crisis we are facing. I have been following George Monbiot’s writings for many years, and in 2019 had the privilege of taking part in a podcast interview with him about rewilding. During that time he has only grown into these qualities. His most evident quality as a journalist is his commitment to drawing public attention to the abuses of the rich and powerful, that not only trash the environment but also deny justice to the poor. However, many left-wing journalists are prone to over-simplifying complex issues and getting drawn into tribal one-dimensionality. Monbiot is not. His background in zoology has equipped him with a strong awareness of systems, and of the inter-relationships we all depend on. The fire is always there, but he also examines the science carefully, considers counter-arguments, and references everything assiduously, whilst also producing highly readable prose – no mean achievement. His new book, ‘Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet’ is an exceptional achievement, on a topic of vast importance, that I have been sufficiently impressed by to want to review immediately.

Monbiot’s book is an investigation into how we can address all the competing conditions around food production so as to feed the world without trashing it. That means that all sorts of holy cows (both figurative and literal) need to put firmly into retirement and strongly discouraged from reproducing themselves. The debate around this is full of all sorts of unquestioned absolutizations and entrenched oppositions that can only be addressed by reconsidering the framework in which they are thought about. Monbiot does this by rightly insisting on maintaining the broader question of how the poor of the world are going to be fed alongside that of how environmental destruction from farming can be reduced or eliminated. He does not accept partial answers as final, whether that means organic farming dependent on animal manure, rewilding on the Knepp model with very small numbers of animals culled for meat in a rewilded landscape, or no-till farming that still employs herbicides to clear the unploughed ground for a new crop. All of these models are respected as far as they go – but it is nowhere near far enough to address all the complex conditions we are facing. Monbiot has to constantly employ the Middle Way in practice to find his way through these complex arguments – even though he would probably not call it that, and even still uses the term ‘incremental’ pejoratively. He has to be balanced in a deeper sense of balance, avoiding absolutizations, to be radical in the ways the situation requires.

Monbiot leaves us in no doubt about the urgency and importance of food production as the most important source of our global problems of global heating and loss of biodiversity. 12% of the world’s land area is used to grow crops, and 28% for animal grazing – yet animals fed by grazing alone provide only 1% of the world’s protein, and 43% of those croplands are used to grow food for animals. This means that if everyone adopted a plant-based diet, we could not only eliminate use of land for pasture but also a large proportion of the cropland – freeing up three-quarters of the world’ agricultural land for rewilding (all these figures can be checked on Oxford University’s Our World in Data site). As Monbiot writes:

I have come to see land use as the most important of all environmental questions. I now believe it is the issue that makes the greatest difference to whether terrestrial ecosystems and Earth systems survive or perish. The more land we require, the less is available for other species… and for sustaining the planetary equilibrium states on which our lives depend. (p.77)

One of the reasons that people often underestimate the importance of land use is that they read figures about the contribution of agriculture to global heating that show it to be just one of a number of contributing sources, not the biggest. Its impact on global heating is systematically underestimated, because these figures do not take into account what the land used for agriculture is not doing because it is being used by agriculture – the “opportunity costs” as Monbiot calls them. These opportunity costs are huge, because they mean that around 30% of the world’s land that could be absorbing carbon as forest, wetland etc, is not doing so. When this is pointed out, the farming lobby often responds with exaggerated claims about the levels of carbon absorption in the soil of pasture when optimally managed (including the work of Allan Savory, which Monbiot carefully debunks). According to Monbiot and his references, not only are these claims exaggerated, but the latest research might lead us to question whether carbon can be reliably stored in soil (other than very wet soil or peat) at all. Another reason why people underestimate it is that they consider global heating in isolation from the biodiversity crisis – which is just as pressing. Land use is indisputably the source of the biodiversity crisis: we are just not giving enough space to other life forms.

Monbiot’s reminders of the widest pressing conditions through reliably-sourced statistics form an important backbone of the case in his book, but there is much more to it than that. The first chapter begins much more personally, in an orchard, where Monbiot sits down to look carefully at a small patch of soil, in the process bringing home its complexity. Most of the book consists of a series of encounters with key people who can give him evidence about potential ways forward in the land use crisis. There is Iain Tolhurst, who successfully produces organic fruit and veg on a commercial scale without using animal manure, through the use of wild flower strips to provide cover for pest predators and applications of wood chip to boost fertility. There is Tim Ashton, the no-till grain farmer, and finally Pasi Vainikka, a Finnish developer of revolutionary new food protein through the fermentation of bacteria in vats. It is this final, “farmfree” high-tech solution to meeting humanity’s protein needs that gets the most emphasis in Monbiot’s publicity video for the book (below), but the other figures were to my mind just as interesting and relevant.

The work of Iain Tolhurst (‘Tolly’) is remarkable because it demonstrates the falsity of the insistence often found in organic or permaculturist circles that animal use is always necessary for a sustainable food system. As Monbiot points out, many organic farms thus make themselves dependent on livestock farms as sources of manure, with little checking of how those animals have been treated or what antibiotic residues might be in their manure. More importantly, manure is also a very blunt instrument for fertilizing a crop, providing constant nutrients when the plant needs them more at some times than others: manure can thus contribute greatly to the washing out of excessive nutrients that is in the process of destroying the ecology of many British rivers. ‘Tolly’ by contrast, has not only found ways of limiting pest numbers by harbouring their predators in a biodiverse area of wild flowers near the crop, but also manages to fertilize it successfully through only limited applications of wood chippings. Monbiot’s case is that crops do not need manure – what they need is the gentler nourishment provided by limited plant material at the right time in their development.

As a functional vegan of about 30 years, who is now developing a forest garden for sustainable food production on former pasture land, this was eye-opening. I have often had doubts about the argument that animals are necessary, but have never had sufficient evident to support it, and thus have increasingly considered it a weakness in the vegan case. However, reading Monbiot’s book has made me much more confident in my belief that I can set up sustainable food production in a forest garden without needing animals or (in the long-term) their manure – although for the moment I have inherited a large heap of it with the land. That’s a great relief, as I particularly do not want the time-consuming responsibility of looking after animals, quite apart from the land use issues. In the short term, that means lots of mowing, but in the longer term that will decrease as the land I am working with becomes more effectively forested and covered with other perennials.

Monbiot also discusses the huge value of switching to perennial plants rather than annuals, so that we do not have to keep breaking up the soil with its valuable micro-organisms, earthworms and rhizosphere (zone around roots set up to sustain a plant). I was already very much aware of this from my reading of agroforestry literature – which oddly Monbiot does not mention at all. He starts to make use of a new perennial type of wheat called Kernza, which again was a fascinating discovery for me, but for some reason he does not discuss all the other ways that trees and perennial plants can help to fulfil our needs for not only fruit and nuts, but also potentially legumes and other vegetables, and the ways that agroforestry can create a very biodiverse space that nevertheless produces lots of food. His question may be ‘Can this feed the world?’ and this is a fair enough question, but one that I would have liked to see him address. My own guess for now is that agroforestry can at least make a significant contribution to feeding the world, because although it does not produce commercial quantities of any one foodstuff, it could offer a very sustainable (and low-labour) alternative means of food production for small communities that does not necessarily require large amounts of land (nor necessarily high-quality arable farmland).

Monbiot’s case, however, is that what we need most of all is a ‘new agronomy’, giving us a detailed enough understanding of fertility to be able to reproduce Tolly’s successful experiment in animal-free organic horticulture elsewhere. We also need the rapid development of perennial grain crops, and the development of ‘farmfree’ protein production. We need to stop worrying unnecessarily about ‘food miles’ which a an almost negligible overall effect compared to the impact of land use, but we do need more community ownership and fair trading to counteract the capture of food resources by massive corporate interests. Livestock farmers need to face up to the fact that their industry has no future, but be given help in adapting and diversifying. He thus avoids a series of absolutizing dogmas: the dogmas of those who reject new technology just because it is new, the dogmas of those who think animal farming must be good because it is traditional and enculturated, and the dogmas of those who focus parochially just on one aspect of the complex picture (such as localism) and assume that that is enough to make food production sustainable. Most of all he questions the dogmatism of those who are content to develop small localised sources of organic or permacultural food at a high price, but who dismiss the wider question of how the poor of the world will access the food they need. At no point does Monbiot belittle those who have made these major achievements in making food production more sustainable, but he still points out their limitations, and disagrees with any dogmatic assumption that they are the final solution.

This is a superb book that I think everyone should read, but it is not without its own limitations and mistakes. I have already mentioned the omission of agroforestry, and no doubt many others will have their own favoured solution that they will complain Monbiot either does not consider or does not do justice to. I don’t think he is aiming to be comprehensive, though, only to raise our awareness of some new solutions that we may not have considered very much before. Amongst these, I was not entirely convinced by Monbiot’s degree of enthusiasm for ‘farmfree’ bacterial cultivation. He is right to point out that the use of technology and the ‘yuck’ factor are not grown-up arguments against this. However, enthusiasm for this, as for any new technology whatsoever, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, until we see how well it works in practice when produced in volume and sold to consumers. There is also the question of how much the use of this technology is really necessary, given that we already have plenty of plant-based meat substitutes providing protein, and that these can be produced on massively less land, with massively less incidental suffering , than their animal equivalents. Time will tell.

On his account of the cultural entrenchment of animal farming, though, I felt there were some basic mistakes. He blames the idealization of animal farming on ‘poetry’ – that is, the strong pastoral tradition that presents the life of the shepherd as a bucolic ideal – and thinks we need more ‘numbers’ and less ‘poetry’. This makes the very basic mistake of confusing meaning and belief – that is, the value of the cultural symbols themselves with the negative effects of the dogmatic beliefs that have become associated with them. Pastoral poetry has inspired generations of readers in all sorts of ways: it is largely archetypal in its effects, meaning that it offers inspiration because of its meaning, independently of the beliefs that may have become associated with particular interpretations of it. Poetry as a whole is not to blame for the interpretation of that poetry as supporting dogmatic beliefs about the absolute value of animal agriculture, only for (at worst) limiting our awareness of its downsides by not making those downsides so meaningful to us. The same point applies in reverse to numbers, which are not in themselves significant at all, and thus not beneficial or otherwise. It is the way the numbers are used, to draw our attention to new conditions by more precisely making us aware of their extent, that is valuable. It is not maths that will save the world (plenty of people have been proficient in maths without doing so), but a broadening of awareness beyond one limited set of interdependent conditions to consider the wider systems in which they are embedded. Behind this error is a more basic, and common, mistake in our culture – the failure to distinguish meaning from belief, and thus credit the value of inspiring cultural symbols without reducing them simplistically to belief effects. Jeremy Lent, whom Monbiot admires as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age” is very much subject to the same limitation: one that I tried to broach with him to some extent in a podcast discussion in 2018.

If Monbiot unthinkingly reproduces a few of the dogmas of our age, however, this is a very minor matter compared to the large number of very important ones that he questions. However others may see him, he is not ideologically ‘left wing’ in any ways that restrict his critical skills, but only in ways that are carefully justified in relation to evidence brought into contact with a wide-ranging compassion. He is also quite literally grounded in a very human appreciation of the soil and of the wider environment – a factor that should not be underestimated. He can write wonderfully, and the message he offers here is extremely important. Whatever its minor defects, I urge you to read this book anyway.

Network Stimulus Issues 1: Climate Change

The next main meeting of the Middle Way Network will be on Zoom at 7pm UK time on Sun 14th Feb 2021. In the last few sessions of our ethics and politics series we will be applying the Middle Way to some specific issues, and climate change is the first of those issues. This will also enable us to have some talks from different speakers. To apply the Middle Way to a particular issue is not to come up with a definite prescription or solution for that issue. In accordance with error focus as an approach, we can be more confident about identifying absolutised assumptions to avoid when approaching the issue than we can about the answers. However, hopefully the discussion will help you examine your own views of the issue.

The massive threat posed by climate change makes it an obvious source of fear, but because it is also a very complex issue, panicked or extreme reactions are the last thing we need. It is possible to recognise the urgency of the issue without panicking, and whilst maintaining a determination to stay in the Middle Way. Robert M. Ellis will suggest various absolutizations that it might be helpful to avoid in approaching climate change – including denialism, extreme pessimism, and sole reliance on one kind of response or solution as the only acceptable one.

There’ll be a short talk on this topic, followed by questions, then discussion in regionalised breakout groups, and a plenary session at the end. If you’re interested in joining us but are not already part of the Network, please see the general Network page to sign up. On that page you can also find links to all the previous network talks on basic approaches to the Middle Way and to ethics and politics.  If you would like catch up more with basic aspects of the Middle Way approach, we are also holding a reading group (next on 21st Feb) which will do this – please contact Jim (at) middlewaysociety.org if you want to join this.

Here is the video from this session:

Suggested reflection questions

  1. What has been your general emotional response to climate change? Does it tend towards either of the extremes of panic or denial, or have you managed to find some sort of balance?
  2. What kind of response do you tend to favour, and how much weight do you put on that type of response?

Suggested further reading/ listening

There is no shortage of books and articles about climate change out there (do feel free to recommend these in comments). Here are some resources related to the society and the Middle Way. Some of these may now be getting a bit out of date in some respects, given the ever-developing information about climate changes.

Podcast interview with Adam Corner of the Climate Outreach and Information Centre

Podcast interview with Jonathan Porritt

‘Fiddling while the Planet Burns’ blog post by Robert

‘Embracing Extinction’ talk by Stephen Batchelor at our Festival in 2020

Review of ‘Facing Gaia’ by Bruno Latour

Embracing Extinction: Stephen Batchelor Festival Talk

In this talk Stephen Batchelor highlights the two main existential threats facing humanity and the planet today, namely the Climate Emergency and the Corona Virus crisis. These are both explored within the wider contexts of Buddhism and the Middle Way

This talk was given at the Virtual Festival of the Middle Way, conducted on Zoom on 18th April 2020, with Barry Daniel as chair.

The talk is followed by discussion.

Who moved my cheese?

I was rather amused recently to pick up the little fable ‘Who Moved my Cheese?’, which my daughter had picked up on her travels. Published in 1998 and written by Spencer Johnson, this was apparently a massive bestseller, interpreted for some reason as being about business – although it’s about business no more and no less than any other area of human life. It deals with basic questions about human motivation and responses to change. Its core message is, interestingly enough, about the Middle Way in some respects, though it also seems to slightly miss the point in some others.

What enables this fable to get straight to the point is the way it strips down the complexity of human experience, by setting the story in an apparent endless (almost Borgesian) maze and reducing the focus of all human desires and values to ‘cheese’. We don’t know where ‘cheese’ comes from, or what rules, if any, determine its appearance in the maze (we don’t need to know). All we know is that it appears in the maze from time to time and is the only goal for the characters in the fable. I imagine that Johnson must have started his fable as being about mice in a maze in a psychological experiment, but then decided that mice did not reflect the complexity of human nature closely enough. So instead we have four characters – two mice and two ‘Littlepeople’ (humans that are the same size as mice, and in the same situation).

The mice, Sniff and Scurry, are mainly just a contrast with the Littlepeople, Hem and Haw, said to behave in more straightforward ways due to their smaller brains. This was one area that I found unconvincing, because it seems likely that mice could also get into the same kinds of problems that the Littlepeople do. The problem that frames the story is that all four characters have been accustomed to finding cheese in one place, ‘Cheese Station C’, but then it dwindles and disappears. The mice quickly adapt and scurry off to sniff out cheese elsewhere, but the humans are cognitively attached to only getting  cheese in that one place, so they continually rationalise their belief that the cheese will start coming there again. Of the two LIttlepeople, Hem is so stuck that he never leaves Cheese Station C, and gets thinner and thinner, but eventually, with many struggles, Haw overcomes his fear of change and goes off to look for cheese elsewhere. Eventually, of course, he finds it.

So what does this have to do with the Middle Way? Well, the Middle Way is the avoidance of absolutisation, which means getting stuck in particular beliefs that one takes to be the whole story. This is exactly what Hem does, as he absolutises his belief that cheese will return to Cheese Station C and keeps going back there day after day. Haw, on the other hand, illustrates the positive process of the practice of the Middle Way, as he gradually starts to think more provisionally and consider other possibilities. The contrast between them illustrates the adaptivity of the Middle Way – namely, the way in which avoiding absolutisation allows us to face up to changed conditions. To take an overwhelming parallel from the present, Hem could be seen as a climate change denier, stuck in old patterns of thinking, whilst Haw is someone who gradually faces up to the high probability that the ‘cheese’ of a habitable range of planetary temperatures is dwindling and may be about to disappear entirely.

However, there are also aspects of the Middle Way that I think the fable misses. The chief one of these is the tendency for absolutisation to come in opposed pairs of opposites, the attractiveness of which is so strong that the rejection of one absolute is almost bound to result at least temporarily in the adoption of the opposite extreme. This would result in Haw not just reluctantly starting to look for new cheese, but suddenly being struck, as by a revelation, of the falsehood of his previous belief of the Second Coming of cheese to Cheese Station C. He then might become slightly manic in his search for cheese elsewhere, or indeed might fixate on one other alternative cheese station where he believes it’s bound to be. Giving up on absolutes is not just a binary switch from one view to another, but involves a process of navigation between extremes, with constant adjustment and re-adjustment. There is no sign in the fable that Johnson gets this aspect of psychology, constantly illustrated as it is by human behaviour.

Johnson’s attribution of the ‘stuck’ state to one of the Littlepeople rather than to the mice also seems questionable to me, because it assumes that mice don’t get stuck – i.e. that it’s a uniquely human trait arising from our large brains. However, all other mammals and birds have the same bilateral brain structure that we do, which presumably means that the goal-oriented left hemisphere in other animals can become over-dominant just as it can for us. You don’t necessarily have to have a representation in language, as humans do, to be implicitly convinced that your image of the world is absolutely correct. The monkey trap, in which monkeys who put their hand in a jar to get food are trapped by the narrow aperture of the jar as long as they won’t let go of the food, would be an example of another species getting ‘stuck’ in the same way. So I’m not sure that Spencer could not have written a more straightforward fable that was just about mice, rather than inventing ‘Littlepeople’ who are in the position of mice.

In the Wikipedia article on ‘Who Moved my Cheese?’ (which you could read for an alternative summary of the story), one of the criticisms that have been made of it is mentioned. Managers have apparently given the book out to their employees to encourage them to respond ‘flexibly’ to re-structuring or redundancy – a procedure that obviously involves interpreting the story far too narrowly. The employees could just as reasonably give the book to their managers to encourage them to respond ‘flexibly’ to a demand for better pay and conditions! The conditions we need to adapt to are not those created by those who have assumed authority, because those people could also do some adapting in solidarity with others, rather than adopting the demand for provisionality as a tool of power. The people who give and take away the cheese are not the managers but rather the conditions that really are beyond our control, and perhaps even our explanation. The use or abuse of the story in business seems to have contributed to a lack of understanding of its universality.

So, I wouldn’t make excessive claims for this little book. You’re unlikely to get very much more from reading it than you will from my summary or that on Wikipedia. It offers some insights, but also lacks a few more. Nevertheless, it is interesting that it has apparently struck such a chord with its readers and been so accessible. It may be worth picking up if, as it did for me, it crosses your path.

 

 

The New Class Struggle

In recent weeks I have been hacking my way through piles of exam papers, particularly featuring a question about Marx. Although this activity generally requires the suppression of all creative impulses in favour of total concentration, I still haven’t managed to stop myself engaging in some reflections about the relevance or otherwise of Marx’s beliefs about class struggle today, and how it all relates to the Middle Way. Now that I’ve finished the marking, I’m finally at sufficient liberty to write down my thoughts.

In ‘The Communist Manifesto’, Marx and Engels famously described the whole of human history as a history of class struggle. In one way or another, they say, the propertied classes have constantly found new ways of exploiting the unpropertied proletariat, in differing circumstances from ancient slavery to the factory floor. However, they go on, capitalism creates such extreme exploitation that eventually the workers “will have nothing to lose but their chains”. Purified by their total exploitation, they will overthrow the bourgeoisie in a revolution, which will usher in a merely temporary dictatorship of the proletariat, followed by the ultimate stability of the communist society.

The elements of dogma in this story are not too hard to identify. The socio-economic determinism is one: Marx’s ‘inevitable’ story shows no signs of turning out quite like that. The purification of the proletariat through suffering is also a projection that seems to have no basis in psychological, let alone historical, conditions. Far from gaining the ultimate wisdom to finally end social and political conflict, people who are suffering acutely tend to get more stressed and more reactive. It’s only if you are very well prepared for your suffering that you might be able to learn from it, but even then it’s unlikely to bring you to an absolute state of moral perfection.

Nevertheless, the power in Marx’s story, fuelling several revolutions, also suggests to me that there must be some insights in it, mixed in with the dogmas. The story that history is a matter of class struggle does seem potent, because it is indeed quite possible to analyse history in that way.  More profoundly, though, class struggles are also struggles within individuals, who identify with different sets of beliefs that may either prioritise narrow economic interests or wider values. Those conflicting values also defy resolution because they are framed in absolute terms. When you feel that you have to choose between your job and your conscience, for instance, that is ‘class struggle’ in a the wider sense, whether you are a nineteenth century mill worker or a modern Conservative Member of Parliament. You can focus on class struggle sociologically and ignore the psychology (as Marx did), or you can focus on resolving the psychology of the personal struggle and ignore its political dimension (as in the recent phenomenon of ‘McMindfulness’), but the phenomena you are dealing will have all these dimensions, and the tendency to ignore some of them is an unfortunate result of over-specialisation.

Property can provide powerful vested interests, but vested interest is not the only human motivation, so I cannot agree with Marx’s assumption that the story of class conflict is only about the division between those who have property and those who do not. Instead, it seems to me more powerfully to be between those who absolutise narrow motives (including, but not limited to, property interests) and those who, whilst remaining human and having interests, are capable of thinking provisionally about them and weighing up different values. Ironically enough, those who are capable of doing this quite often have a modest amount of property, which has given them enough security to be able to start thinking provisionally. Those who have no property at all are often (but not always) so insecure that it’s difficult for them to avoid thinking in absolute ways that are constantly fuelled by craving and anxiety. No, the proletariat are not purified by their suffering. Rather their suffering makes them easier for unscrupulous absolutists to exploit.

So what is the class struggle today? Well, we are in the midst of it. The US and the UK particularly are currently wracked by political conflict that seems to have a strong class basis. That political conflict involves ongoing polarised disagreement about climate change, about nationalism, about social justice, about the rights of minorities, and about the role of the state, along with many other associated issues. It’s not a conflict between the property-owning bourgeoisie and the propertyless proletariat though. Rather it’s primarily a conflict between, on the one hand, a cabal of autocrats and billionaires with their numerous stooges, and on the other, middle class intellectuals. Not all members of any particular socio-economic group are necessarily on one side or the other – there are still middle class intellectual climate change denialists, working class internationalists, and billionaire liberals. Nevertheless, the conflicts have a strong class dimension as well as a psychological and philosophical dimension. It would be surprising if they didn’t, given how important social class is to our identity.

The ‘middle class intellectual’ class has not been merely created by material conditions and accompanying vested interests, as Marx would tell us. Rather, they have come to appreciate conditions better, and overcome some of their biases, by having their minds opened in one of a variety of possible ways. University education and professional training provide the most common vectors for it (as shown in Robert Kegan’s work on the contexts for what he calls stage 4 and 5 adult psychological development). Travel, friendship, study, art, and religious experience all provide other possible routes to bigger perspectives that may help to inoculate you against becoming a stooge.

The new propertied exploiters, on the other hand, are defined either by their narrow focus on power and economic advantage, or by other dominant absolute beliefs that facilitate that exploitation (such as religious fundamentalism). The majority of their supporters, though, are subject to what Marx called ‘false consciousness’: that is, they have been influenced into a set of beliefs that are against their own long-term best interests. The sources of false consciousness now come overwhelmingly from media manipulation that can apparently be traced back to autocrats and billionaires, from Fox News to the Daily Mail to Russian troll factories. This media bias chart provides a useful reference of the sources of such manipulation (which are found on left as well as right, but are overwhelmingly weighted towards the right). The strong links between climate change denial, the fossil fuel industry, and right wing politics are also confirmed by a number of academic studies.

In Marx’s analysis, intractable class conflict can come to an end only through violent revolution that breaks the mould of the system. Unfortunately this seems to be another of his delusions, if the evidence of actual revolutions is anything to go by. A revolution may change those in power, but it is unlikely to change the systemic patterns of interaction, which are likely to reassert themselves to a greater or lesser degree (as they did in the Soviet Union). The stakes in our new class conflict, though, are far higher than just the exploitation of one class. The very survival of human civilisation is at stake. The conflict may end in the ‘revolution’ of the destruction of all, or it may be gradually ameliorated through changes in the ways that we respond to conditions. Either way, though, the middle-class intellectuals will evidently prevail in the long-run, just as Marx predicted that the proletariat would prevail, either by being proved right or by running the world their way. That’s not because they’ve been purified or because their perspective is perfect, but rather because they imperfectly recognise that their perspective is imperfect when their opponents do not.

Is this another story as incredible as Marx’s? I think it identifies some of Marx’s insights (class conflict, its intractability, its relationship to ideology, its asymmetry, and the nature of false consciousness) whilst also drawing attention to his dogmas (determinism, absolutisation of vested interest, purification of suffering) and limitations (ignorance of psychology, ignorance of ecology). Marx was concerned, most basically, with how people address conditions, but the ‘science’ with which he interpreted this was heavily loaded with false assumptions. The updated story I’m offering in its place may also be based on some false assumptions, but at least it is based to some degree of recognition of the need to address such assumptions (Marx tended, instead, to say that his story was ‘science’ and everyone else’s was ‘ideology’).

I expect some of the first reactions to that alternative story to be based on false equivalence, which is a common absolutist strategy (think of Trump drawing equivalences between white supremacist demonstrators and their opponents). For an absolutist, everything is dual, and there can be no such thing as better judgement through provisionality. Their opponents are therefore always assumed to be as absolute as they are, and they will insist on reducing all complexity to that equivalence. Incremental marks of credibility (such as expertise, relative lack of vested interest, ability to observe, and corroboration) as well as every kind of evidence and every widely-used value, are ground down by absolutists into the same false equivalence. However, as Marx recognised, the class struggle is asymmetrical. One side is right and the other wrong (even if it’s not always clear who is on each side), because the wrong side is entirely blinded by its assumptions, totally immersed in confirmation bias. We are all subject to confirmation bias, but some of us are facing up to this fact and others are not.

The other objection I am expecting will be to point out a false dichotomy. “It’s not as simple as that,” you may say. “Surely there were not just two conflicting classes in Marx’s day, and there aren’t now either?” I agree. I am only trying to make sense of the idea of “class conflict” by separating out the elements that seem to demonstrably cause conflict from those that are just Marxian dogmas. However, any generalisations we make about “classes”, especially when they involve determinately dividing people up, are fraught with all kinds of complex difficulties. That’s why I only want to define the “classes” in terms of their relationships to absolutisation. Whenever you or I are dominated by absolutisation, we’re in the repressive class, as exploiters or their stooges, even if we’re middle-class intellectuals. If we cease to do so and start to judge provisionally, even if we’re in the pay of Fox News, we cease at least temporarily to be in that exploitative class. We cannot define the classes sociologically in any way that I find remotely satisfactory. The social categories I have used above can only be proxies for psychological ones, and are just ways of pointing out that the psychological conditions do have constant social implications.

Psychologically, too, absolutism is not defined by counter-absolutism, but by its own assumptions.  Once again, then, we also see that the Middle Way is not a compromise. If we respond to absolutists with counter-absolutism (as some left-wing absolutists do) we become absolutists. However, if we respond critically but with confident provisionality, we are not being dogmatic. The practice of the Middle Way is provisionality, not compromise, and the confidence with which it needs to be taken up must not be automatically mistaken for dogma. The Middle Way seems to be the only practical solution to the class conflict that so much concerned Marx.