The Problem with the Anthropocene: Kainos, Not Anthropos

Abstract

Almost immediately after it was mooted as a descriptor for our current geological age, the Anthropocene came under sustained criticism. It was said the label projected unearned heroism onto humanity as master of the natural world, while downplaying the culpability of the Global North for unlocking the ruinous potential of industrialism and technology (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016; Haraway, 2015; Malm, 2015; Moore, 2015). Numerous alternatives have been suggested to diagnose those self-destructive tendencies more precisely: Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Urbanocene, Necrocene, etc. But while the human-centric prefix of the Anthropocene continues to draw the most scrutiny, I will focus upon its latinized suffix, cænus—or rather its original Greek equivalent, kainos (“new,” “novel,” “innovative”). My concern is with the way “innovation” and “novelty” are imbued with a sense of qualitative superiority, so that the pursuit of innovation becomes an indispensable part of any strategy to ameliorate climate crisis. I argue that developing more robust responses to the Anthropocene necessitates our reckoning with the myopia of innovation—not just the inevitable uncertainties of implementing new technologies, but also the valorization of possessive ingenuity that inhibits any social utility.

The blitheness with which such writers wave away the potential devastation of climate change is predicated in no small way upon their assumption that if “the tropics” (or rest of the Global South) became uninhabitable, the continued prosperity of the Global North still represents a net positive result—provided enough “intellectually talented” individuals survive.¹ The danger of all such technophilic solutionism lies in the perversity of its priorities. Rather than addressing mundane concerns like homelessness, access to potable water, or infrastructural maintenance, the doyens of “effective altruism” fixate upon the infinite horizon, the concerns of early Martian colonists, or the threat of sentient AI. Speculative fantasy can be wonderful, but not if it is allowed to dominate and derail policy discussions: Recent meetings of the UN Convention on Climate Change (COP26 in Scotland, COP27 in Egypt) demonstrate how “moonshot” approaches to climate melioration reinforce the belief among investors and policymakers that “setting a goal and encouraging innovation to achieve it” is always preferable to basing strategies on what “is possible with current solutions and technologies.”² In 2021 and 2022, Indigenous groups representing those most affected by climate change were denied official credentials or had their credentials revoked, while a parade of climate start-ups and entrepreneurial disruptors were granted enormously lucrative opportunities to tout robotic insect pollinators, milk casein textiles, aeroponic farms, photosynthesis calculators, and solar-powered shirt-ironing stations (Lakhani, 2022). The presumptive utility of innovation blurs the line between the promise and the proof that so-called bridge fuels like “green” hydrogen actually facilitate economic decarbonization (Beswick et al., 2021; John, 2020). Hydrogen Europe, an umbrella organization whose membership includes major fossil fuel companies like Shell and British Petroleum, held its own dedicated event at COP27, culminating in the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the EU, Egypt, and Namibia, which established a new strategic partnership for increasing importation of “renewable” hydrogen as a replacement for Russian fossil gas.³ Thus, rather than contemplating any fundamental change in First World patterns of consumption, climate change is treated like a cinematic MacGuffin—a convenient plot device within our civilizational narrative, whereby the loss of biodiversity awakens human ingenuity to overcome all planetary boundaries.

By contrast, within fifth- and fourth-century Attic culture, the promotion of kainotēs (“novelty,” “newness”) was commonly viewed with suspicion, as political-cultural innovations were explicitly linked to the expectation of reward or malicious intention.⁴ Whatever collective benefit might accrue from artistic and scientific breakthroughs, there was a significant cost to traditional moral education and a danger of excess vanity.⁵ The introduction of kainos as a distinctive mode of “newness” around the early fifth century BCE suggests an interesting counterpoint to what was already conveyed through the earlier attested Mycenaean word neos (Chadwick & Baumbach, 1963, p. 224). As Armand D'Angour observes, kainos expresses not just temporal recentness (or youthfulness), but a thoroughly unexpected, even diabolical inventiveness (D'Angour, 2011, pp. 21–24). Kainos can imply a deliberate break with the “old” (when used in contrast with “old fashioned”), but above all it is unexpectedness that colors its significance—kainos encompasses the “revolutionary” potential of discoveries like penicillin, as well as the accidental nature of their discovery.⁶ The surprise of the qualitatively new brings with it both suspicion and dread. “Newness” [kainótēs] almost invariably applies to that which is manufactured through human agency, making such creations “unnatural”—hence the charges brought against Socrates included the promotion of “new gods” [kaina daimonia (Apology 24b–c)]. However cynical Socrates’ accusers may have been, their prosecutorial strategy shrewdly appealed to the jury's innate suspicion of unexpected, potentially fraudulent, preternatural cleverness.

While “innovation” may not rise to the level of Grundbegriffe within our political lexicon, its meaning comprises an essential aspect of the Anthropocene, whose own coinage (borrowing again from Koselleck) serves as a preconception (Vorgriff) with “prognostic potential that extends out beyond the singular situation that occasioned it” (Koselleck, 2018, p. 142). The Anthropocene posits humanity's entrance into a new threshold period (Sattelzeit), rivaling the 1750—1850 era of accelerated change that encompassed the French Revolution, Industrial Revolution, and Enlightenment (Koselleck, 1996, p. 69). As we cross into the Anthropocene, “democracy,” “humanity,” and “nature” are undergoing potentially profound and lasting transformations in their meaning. In a similar sense, the neglected plenitude of kainos encapsulates a key tension concerning innovation in the Anthropocenic present: on the one hand, recent history is replete with high-profile implosions of “revolutionary” innovations (e.g., Theranos blood testing, Tesla's driverless technology, and Neuralink brain chips, cryptocurrency exchanges, the metaverse); on the other hand, our collective hopes of avoiding catastrophic increases in global temperatures remain wedded to the expectation of a last-minute breakthrough.

In the face of an imminent, unavoidable, and rapidly accelerating climate crisis, the valorization of the “new and innovative” is a ripe target for critique, both as a root cause and a much-touted solution for our current trajectory. Many of us already have clear intimations of the mounting risks of crop failure, water shortages, and coastal erosion. Many of us appreciate the need to drastically reduce or eliminate our reliance upon fossil fuels. However, as Elizabeth Kolbert makes alarmingly clear in her recent book, the true scale of the challenge is difficult to contemplate without courting despair (Kolbert, 2021). For a start, even if a total cessation of CO₂ production were immediately achievable, it is unlikely to avert a cataclysm. We would still require a massively scalable means for removing existing surpluses of CO₂. Our problem is not just overconsumption in the present, but the cumulative history of industrialized excess that imbues our thinning stratosphere with Damoclean menace (Carrington, 2021). Nevertheless, there remains a generalized expectation that some future breakthrough in energy production (or solar radiation management, or refreezing sea ice, or the capture and storage of excess CO₂) is just over the horizon and will arrive in time to prevent the irreversible death spiral retreat of ice at the poles.⁷

The discontinuation of 10,000 years of relative climate stability is barely conceivable. Even the grimmest imaginings of the Holocene's aftermath tend to assume Earth's climate will resolve into a new equilibrium—albeit an unjust and unbearable one for most of the surviving population. Against this post-apocalyptic “bunker” image, the long-term temperature data brought to light by the EU-funded North Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) and the US-funded Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2) suggests a far more sudden and dramatic transition from modern civilization. The GRIP and GISP2 projects (two of at least nine major International Geosphere-Biosphere projects undertaken since the 1990s) confirm earlier analyses by the geophysicists Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger, who in 1966 were granted access to the US military base at Camp Century (Mayewski & White, 2002). There, they studied oxygen isotopes in ice core samples, the remainders of an aborted project to secret nuclear warheads under the Greenland ice. What their team uncovered was a hitherto unimagined possibility about historical variations in climate, whereby rapid and profoundly unpredictable changes are the norm rather than the exception, and from which Dansgaard–Oeschger events take their name (Petersen, 2008).

Should the Earth revert to the Pleistocenic status quo, modern society as it exists today would abruptly end. Rapid temperature fluctuations of plus-or-minus 14°C burst the imaginative boundaries of current worst-case scenarios based on mere 2°C –4°C changes. Agriculture and manufacturing would soon be lost to history, as the unraveling of seasonal weather patterns make large-scale harvesting impossible and established trade networks unviable. A return to pre-Holocene climatic instability would hopelessly isolate any bunkers into which elite survivalists might retreat, as dramatic fluctuations in the water tables alone render such underground structures impossible to maintain. Humankind as a newly unstratified whole would be forcibly reintroduced to the nomadic life that defined its previous 290,000 years of existence, forever on the move, chasing our food supply across the planet. A world of boats, not bunkers. Without batteries and ink, cultural traditions themselves would once more become oral and mnemonic; freedom of movement would no longer be inhibited by the artificial contrivances of laws and borders. On an undomesticated planet, we would find ourselves beholden once again to the “authority” of water cycles, wildlife migration, and the retreat of temperate zones. This is all assuming, of course, our species can survive the transition. Given how humans (but especially First World beneficiaries of new and old imperialisms) have reduced vast arable regions to monoculture and domesticated whatever foraging animals we did not hunt to extinction—it is possible our ecological resilience as a species will prove fatally insufficient. Kolbert's book is a fascinating catalogue of experimental disasters in climate management dating all the way back to the 18th century. Yet, she cannot avoid the conclusion that “innovation” is our only hope. Kolbert interviews Andy Parker, a lead project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, who sees the current state of geoengineering technology as comparable to chemotherapy: a crude, harmful last resort for basic survival (Kolbert, 2021, p. 150).

How might we avoid this fate? How might we mobilize a more timely and effective response? Some environmental writers have suggested cognitive biases, including a “shifting baseline syndrome,” inhibit the capacity of most people to perceive catastrophic change with sufficient motivational and emotional salience (Roberts, 2020). World-changing, species-endangering disruptions typically occur on a geological, inhuman timescale. It is left to science fiction writers like Kim Stanley Robinson and Jeff VanderMeer to develop provocative imaginings of proximal climate futures: the sudden threat of “wet bulb” heatwaves killing 20 million people in a single week, the supplanting of international agreements with unilateral experiments in geoengineering, the escalation of ecoterrorism, and the swift unraveling of globalized production and trade (Robinson, 2020; VanderMeer, 2021). Of course, the status of science fiction, as a supposedly lesser literary genre, limits the extent to which these dark visions become a focus for public policy. Yet even the accumulation of hard data on Earth's prehistory (samples from the Vostok region of Antarctica date between 420,000 and 800,000 years) does not seem enough to shake our complacency (Angus, 2016; Malm, 2023). From this vantage point, the Anthropocene is the harbinger of humanity's self-incurred catastrophe—the final, sudden overturning of the predominant civilizational narrative.

The absence of concerted climate action is only part of the problem. Within the ranks of policymakers and powerbrokers, the relentless pursuit of technology-based solutions has enabled the continual delay of a much-needed reckoning with how we consume and how we use the land we live upon.⁹ Given the potential scale of civilizational surprises sown by First World industrialization, it would seem unwise to restrict policy design to the narrow field of expected GDP growth. But this is not a consensus view. In his recent broadside against climate change “alarmism,” Joseph Heath insists upon an environmentalism of cost–benefit analysis as the only prudent approach (Heath, 2021). With barely concealed exasperation, Heath rejects the “hijacking” of climate policy by activist writers like Naomi Klein, who insist upon attaching redress for structural and historical injustice to what could be a much less burdensome, calculative balancing of social costs for decarbonization (Heath, 2021, p. 285n91). And what is the basis for Heath's confidence that “there is no plausible scenario in which climate change results in the extinction of our species, and no probable scenario in which it brings the end of civilisation” (Heath, 2021, p. 82)? Despite his avowed pragmatism, Heath displays inordinate faith in the rippling responsiveness of consumer choice toward minute adjustments in a hypothetical carbon tax scheme (Heath, 2021: 174, 273). Above all else, it is the power of human ingenuity that underwrites his sanguinity: since “[h]umans possessed of only stone age technology survived 4°C warming at the end of the last ice age” (Heath, 2021, pp. 80, 82), our odds of survival in the Anthropocene must be better, given the subsequent millennia of technological gains. Of course, this assumes our post-industrial, internet-reliant, services-sector skillsets map neatly onto the competencies needed in a post-civilizational hunter-gatherer landscape—despite the efforts of over 500 years of “civilisation” to modernize, colonize, and eradicate “premodern” practices.¹⁰ Absent such assumptions, we have every reason to question whether market-based carbon pricing is any less fantastical or motivationally burdensome than “utopian” suggestions to more directly confront inequality and promote civilizational degrowth. As Adrienne Buller has argued, piecemeal market-based switches (consuming chicken instead of beef; using natural gas instead of coal) are all-too-hopelessly hamstrung by disparities in carbon pricing, political lobbying and local opposition (Buller, 2022, pp. 57–76). What the evidence suggests is that we have already run out of time to innovate and incentivize a future that reassuringly resembles our present (Wadhams, 2016).

And even if we had the means to efficiently remove excess carbon from the atmosphere, we still lack a concerted political will for implementation.¹¹ As Andreas Malm observes, the untested novelty of geoengineering is presented as a realistic and reliable solution to the climate crisis only because it comports with the socio-political understanding of capitalism as an unchangeable constant set against a manipulable natural world: “The natural becomes plastic and contingent; the social becomes set in stone” (Sapinski et al., 2021, p. 147). To reliably scale proven means of carbon dioxide removal (land reclamation, regenerative organic agriculture, and banning fracking), we first need to find a way to reverse decades of state retrenchment, the corporatization of scientific research, and asymmetric international competition—all within a shrinking temporal window beset by concurrent emergencies of droughts, flooding, and wildfires.

For writers like Joseph Heath, such concerns simply mark the end of a productive conversation. The end of civilization is unthinkable precisely because it overturns too many foundational presuppositions (the expectation of personal property and the sphere of privacy it enables, the preservation of vocational choice and societal progress). Radical innovation thereby remains more feasible than any sea change in societal priorities—despite mounting evidence that many prominent technologists and entrepreneurs are unworthy of public trust. Yet if strategies for degrowth are assumed to be infeasible or normatively undesirable from the outset, this does not eliminate the need to interrogate the modes of thought that makes such strategies seem impossible. “Innovation” is one such obstacle, to the extent that it has been semantically overwritten by an egoistic, possessive pursuit of novelty that requires the constant reassurances of reward. This is also why it is useful to recall how this alignment is neither necessary nor historically consistent.

In Matthew Wright's reading, the boastful parabasis by a caricatured Aristophanes is deliberate self-parody for the ease with which self-praise slides into angry castigation of the audience (Wright, 2012, p. 73). Aristophanes’ poet-innovator claims to be a neglected genius. Paradoxically, his goal is to cater to the audience's amusement—pandering as well as acculturating them to new aesthetic paradigms. But only the poet, and a select number of his sagacious admirers, are equipped to judge this achievement. Failure to win first prize at the festival does not spur the poet to improve his pedagogy, it simply confirms to him the obtuseness of the audience and judges, who do not deserve to be recipients of his genius. Generalizations about ancient political culture remain constrained by the limitations of the available corpus. Even so, the suspicion of novelty can be distinguished from other elitist complaints about democracy, insofar as the critique is internally directed against the hollow accomplishments of aristocratic peers, as well as one's own potential for hubristic overstatement.

What is of immediate interest here is the way the evaluative judgments about novelty are not just elitist but esoteric. Genuine innovations can easily be overlooked or maligned by nonspecialists. Unprecedented inventions must therefore be rhetorically packaged to make their novelty legible—leaving considerable leeway for embellishing one's own radicality while insinuating the derivativeness of competitors. The danger here is that the possessive interests of the innovator will impede the use and enjoyment of the innovation. In Wasps, the action of the play is brought to an abrupt halt, its narrative suspended, and a discordant strain of meta-commentary and abuse hurled against the audience. Undoubtedly, some of the comedy resides in the awkwardness of his demanded appreciation. At the same time, deliberate provocation risks exhausting his audience's patience, denigrating his own art, and exposing the petty status-seeking that drives it (Wright, 2012, pp. 73–74).

The power of kainotēs feeds the wantonness of the dēmos, the lure of the new weakens our discernment of the actual worth of an innovation. Instead of responding meaningfully as a collective, we cede decisional authority to the trendsetters. We find a modern correlate for the sophists in the cults of personality that congeal around certain Silicon Valley visionaries. Though his star has waned following the haphazard takeover of the social media website Twitter, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, enjoyed remarkable success in cultivating a public persona of the maverick scientist, building a dedicated fan-base that included some of the very policymakers charged with financial and regulatory oversight (Hirsh, 2015; Ohnsman, 2021). Tesla explicitly positions itself as a catalyst for “accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy” and justifies its niche market in luxury brand electric vehicles as an essential step toward making renewable energy technology fashionable for the wider public. But there are long-standing concerns that a future reduction in greenhouse emissions does little to offset the immediate impacts of producing lithium–nickel–cobalt batteries, alongside serious human rights violations linked to the extraction process (Taffel, 2018). The company's green credentials have also struggled to comport with the company's primary source of profit. Tesla made its money not from selling cars but from trading surpluses of renewable energy credits to other automotive companies hoping to avoid penalties from increasingly stringent emissions standards (Kharpal, 2021). Then there is the matter of Tesla's perpetually unfulfilled promises on self-driving vehicles (Korosec, 2021). Despite bold pronouncements, the company has repeatedly failed to ensure the reliability and safety of driverless technology—and has instead sought various ways to bypass responsibility for driverless fatalities (Stoklosa, 2022). This raises the question of why subsidies and research funding for climate melioration are being funneled into autonomous vehicle technology? As the marketing material from its 2021 Impact Report makes clear, the two concerns are only made synonymous through the wish-casting of the Tesla CEO: if the existing handling and acceleration technology for autonomous vehicles improves in tandem with electric vehicle efficiency, and if these developments lead to a wider consumer base for Tesla, then the company's production model will become more widely adopted and the “green revolution” will be actualized (Tesla, 2021). This is how possessive ingenuity obscures the distinction between what is necessary to address climate change, and what is desirable from within Elon Musk's longtermist fantasy of a looming battle between AI and the human race (Tangermann, 2021). Matters do not improve when we consider the goals of Tesla's sister company Space X, one of several competing suborbital rocket programs, which claims a similarly tenuous link between “renewable” rocket technology and environmental responsibility (Marais, 2021). It is hard not to share the skepticism of writers like Holly Jean Buck that the “benefits” of geoengineering extend no further than the protection of privately owned material assets (Buck, 2019). Such autarchy cannot be expected to subside into autonomy—the power of kainos cannot be shared, only surrendered. Individual political actors cannot mitigate wildfires, prevent collapses of the food chain, or ensure access to potable water. And innovations born of desperate circumstances, although ingenious, tend to be oriented toward short-term exigencies, whether securing basic shelter and sustenance, or turning a quick profit, such as the current “gold rush” for ancient mammoth tusks unearthed by permafrost melt around the Siberian Batagaika crater, and the proliferation of hand-dug “informal” cobalt mines in Congo (Mundy, 2021, pp. 7–27). The possessive ingenuity of well-heeled entrepreneurs represents this self-serving opportunism on a grander scale.

As we consider the accelerating nature of climate change under the Anthropocene, it is harder to rule out the possibility of a 9/11-type event triggering more sustained and violent discordances, targeting the “Think Factories” of today, at Davos, TEDx, and the Future of Humanity Institute. Overturning the autarchic tendencies of kainos without violence requires rethinking autonomy and the possibilities for political agency in the Anthropocene.

The shepherdless (but “autonomous”) beasts may be contrasted with the autarchy of Orpheus, which is itself an exaggerated version of the modern ideal of autonomy as “sovereignty.” With his matchless ability to enchant human and nonhuman audiences, Orpheus reached the apex of autarchic mastery over the natural world (including an ill-fated attempt to overcome death and rescue his lover Eurydice from Hades). But Orpheus pursued his artistry in bucolic isolation, with little concern for its wider impacts. He did not intend to change the course of rivers or pacify wild nature; those were the unintended consequences of his musicianship. In the end, Orpheus made the mistake of ignoring the suprahuman divinity of the gods, for which he was torn limb from limb by Thracian Maenads; his head tossed into the river to float on his smashed lyre. Despite his mythic reputation, Orpheus’ achievements were wholly ephemeral. His story ends, leaving us to presume that when they had finished weeping over their lost master, the animals returned to old habits and habitats, their harmonious placidity a passing phase.¹³ It is a crude analogy, but not entirely inaccurate to suggest the “Orphic” pretensions of today's innovators (colonizing Mars; extending life expectancy by multiple decades; perfecting artificial intelligence) evince a similar hubris. Is an ecologically exhausted, unstable climate the final answer for the autarchic freedom to do as one pleases? Human “society” is unlikely to disappear with the Anthropocene, if only because it will precipitate a widening, desperate need to maintain supportive human communities, even if those communal structures are compelled by climatic necessity to be forever on the move.

As Kurt Raaflaub explains, the conceptual link between “shepherdless” autonomy and “self-determination” lies in the recognition of certain insurmountable dependency (Raaflaub, 1985, pp. 147–158). The struggle by satellite poleis to conduct their own affairs under the shadow of the Athenian empire was not pursued in the guise of heroic ingenuity or autarchic assertions of will. Hence, autonomia conveys a sense of freedom achieved by virtue of membership in an alliance or commonwealth—which in turn facilitates the “freedom from despotic rule” expressed by eleutheria (Raaflaub, 1985, p. 150). Such nondespotic codependency contrasts with the circumstances created by Orpheus’ performances before his admiring audience of beasts and Muses. Creative kainos is not expected to foster any self-actualizing capacity in others, its reception ranges from reverential appreciation to violent rejection. Returning briefly to Breughel's depiction, it is worth noting that the only figures to meet the spectator's gaze are the animals in the foreground (the hare, the lion, the sheep, and the deer). Perhaps they identify with us, the other shepherdless beings, who will be left to our own devices once the stream of “moonshot” innovations runs dry. There is precious little reassurance to be found in Orphic tranquillity. The pacification of natural predations is quite different from engendering cooperation.

Chakrabarty highlights the ambivalence of the gains in freedom that have come with the Anthropocene. However, my point here is not that the dangers of the Anthropocene arise as a tragic consequence of human freedom. As far as human freedom is concerned, kainos has even less to offer than the pedestrian “justice” of universalized consumption. The viability and ecological benefits of a mass transition to electric vehicles are so attenuated that there is no comparison with the dubious conveniences granted earlier generations from access to coal-fired electricity, single-use plastics, or frozen food. There is no brave new world from kainos, only guileless acceptance of charismatic leadership.

Autarchy and shepherdless autonomy are one concern; the specter of murderous Maenads is another. At present, ecoterrorism is still a nascent threat, and its immediate danger has largely been exaggerated by media coverage of sporadic attacks and the criminalization of Indigenous land defenders (Brown, 2019). Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to downplay the growing convergence of white supremacy and eco-fascism, which from 2019 to 2022 motivated mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, El Paso, Texas, and Buffalo, New York. Whether deserved or not, the assassination of fossil fuel company executives and destruction of transport infrastructure may soon supplant the more familiar “die-ins,” museum vandalism, and traffic blockades by environmental activists. Our failure to meliorate climate change and forestall shrinking access to scarce resources will in retrospect serve as a cause for radicalization across the political spectrum, as revenge for the past replaces hope for the future. Terrorism too can be ruthlessly inventive when targeting the complacencies of everyday social life.

I have argued that “innovation” is a site of conceptual-semantic struggle, just as the meaning of “autonomy” has changed and will change again. Perhaps the future measure of self-determination will depend as much upon one's ability to hibernate, digest poisonous plants, or breathe underwater, as our current, supposedly higher, cognitive capacity to act as if we have given the moral law to ourselves. The urgency and scale of the problem requires renewed historical self-understanding, because our prevailing political culture seems unable to endorse a humbler human future (sans moon bases, sans android servants) without incurring resentment or regret.

The First World dream of limitless growth, and its insistently universal template for national development, has been rudely interrupted, and a needful reckoning with planetary limits is the almost impossible burden of future generations. We still lack an effective model for collective agency to respond to collectivized threats. Seeking clarity and control over our own political vocabularies is, therefore, motivated by the desire to curtail the unaccountable leadership of enterprising innovators, effective altruists, and variegated technologists who have made themselves the pacesetters for the new world dawning.