Religious atavism and the climate crisis, with reference to Taylor and Rorty on liberalism

About the thesis

This doctoral thesis is a theoretical account of the climate crisis paradigm rather than a work of climate policy or empirical research in the natural sciences. It argues that the idea of climate crisis is shaped by inherited anxieties of Western modernity and its discontents.

By ‘religious atavism’, the thesis refers to a return – within ostensibly secular accounts of crisis and emergency – of religious and prophetic patterns of historical orientation: the sense that history has a direction, that the present is a moment of judgment, that liberal modernity stands in need of rupture or renewal, and that personal and collective deliverance depends on right discernment of the times. The argument is developed chiefly through philosophers Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty, with secondary reference to figures such as Bruno Latour, Carl Schmitt, and Ivan Illich.

Abstract

Climate change is often seen as the basis for new grand narratives of Western modernity, but grand narratives in themselves are unstable under the conditions of postsecularity in liberal democracies. By a widely accepted form of deflationary critique through analogy to religion, nominally secular worldviews are susceptible to genealogical redescription in terms of pre-liberal, theological antecedents in Western history. This thesis finds critical resources in theorists of liberalism for reading accounts of climate crisis – that put climate at the centre of contemporary Western self-understanding – as expressions of religious atavism.

Charles Taylor’s genealogical account of secular liberalism provides a framework for understanding climatological claims of transcendental significance. On a Taylorian reading, the reality of climate crisis is perceived, phenomenologically, to repudiate the principle of ‘mutual benefit’ on which the modern moral order of liberal societies depends. Through its ontic validation of liberal-democratic malaise, climate crisis becomes a quasi-transcendental source of guidance and impetus for radical ideas in politics, theory, and culture.

The concept of atavism is suggested in particular by Richard Rorty’s postsecular and historicist view of philosophy as cultural politics. On Rorty’s quietist account, the world-historical magnitude of climate crisis is felt to be a cultural ‘skyhook’ – a foundational source that may be critically redescribed as a vestige of monotheistic dependency. The Rortyan view finds no need of more-than-human validation for utopian speculation, bringing into question the tendency of climate crisis to be invoked as a warrant for broadscale intellectual, social, and political radicalism.

The concurrent conception of climate crisis from both impartial scientific reason and highly conditional ‘malaises of modernity’ is linked to long-standing tensions in the Enlightenment legacy of liberal democracies. Revisionary programmes from climate crisis are thus both powerful and limited: while credible and moving, they nevertheless remain open to Nietzschean critiques of cultural nihilism.

Citation

Veljkovic, Stevan. ‘Religious atavism and the climate crisis, with reference to Taylor and Rorty on liberalism.’DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2023. https://doi.org/10.5287/ora-4rjoobkvk.

Resources

• PDF full textpdf
• Repository record in ORAora
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-4rjoobkvkdoi
• Licence: CC BY 4.0licence

The DOI currently resolves to the ORA record. The PDF is made available here under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

Identifiers

DOI

10.5287/ora-4rjoobkvk

Supervision and examination