Travelling home: my escape from estrangement with the help of a revolutionary, a philosopher, and a man made of stone
1.
Growing up in Vienna, in the 1970s and 80s, I had a Che Guevara poster on my wall. It was a cheap print of his iconic portrait with beret and beard, and accompanied by a slogan:
“Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no terminarán la primavera.”
They can cut all the flowers, but they won’t stop spring.
It was a catchy phrase (by Pablo Neruda), catering to highly inflammable teenage hearts, as was mine. But my fascination was mixed with confusion. Che and the revolution were distant in space and time, plus we already had a socialist government that provided rent control and free education for all. We had central heating and free hospitals, but what we didn’t have was flowers. Children’s playgrounds were built on concrete floors and the sky but a greyish-blue rectangle when we looked up. The air was heavy with the exhausts of endless worms of cars growling through the streets. In my quarter spring only brought about the solitary daisies that fought their way through the cracks in the streets, and the dandelions that sprouted from the rocks that lined the railway tracks. So these unassuming little flowers were Che’s compañeras, I wondered. They looked battered and jagged – like underground guerrilleras indeed, breaking, slashing, shooting their innocuous green stems through thick asphalt, sprouting from the stony bulwarks like an army in attack. If they were spring’s soldiers, who were they fighting? I wondered. The city? Me? Or were we fighting the flowers, and if so, who were we? Civilization? The human species? I didn’t have an answer to these questions, but subtly, on an almost subconscious level, I had a feeling of being out of place. It was a strange sense of loss or being lost. Or both.
I didn’t find them beautiful, the sturdy and spikey railway track dandelions that peeped from behind carelessly discarded soda cans and used paper tissues. I didn’t see them as messengers of spring, certainly not of nature. Nature was pristine beauty. It was the majestic Alpine peaks conquered by brave mountaineers in felt fedoras to bring their ladies the precious Edelweiss. Not that I had ever seen an Edelweiss, I only had the second-hand knowledge from TV programmes. Nature was taxidermy foxes in biology class and wildlife documentaries. Nature was exotic places where people lived in huts. Nature was so far away, I wouldn’t even encounter it on our yearly beach holiday in the Mediterranean, where the scent of Nivea sunscreen was trapped under a canopy of garish beach umbrellas, nor on our annual skiing trips, which left a lasting impression of constricting anoraks, and long queues at the skiing lifts, and bad music on the top station. Nature was always far away. It was not my habitat. If these miserable little dandelions were indeed part of nature, what were they doing here?
Much has changed since then. I finished school. I went to university. I travelled the world, to these far-away countries where, by chance, I encountered that thing called nature. Under wide open skies, enveloped in birdsong and the chorus of sun beetles, in starry nights that were never still but teeming with the mysterious rustling of bushes, the calls of jackals or owls or frogs, I had an inexplicable feeling of homecoming, of safety. It was as if I were part of this wilderness and nature was indeed my habitat.
I looked and listened and smelled. When before I had learned to cocoon myself from the noise and stink of the city, I was wide open now; I learned to recognize and appreciate beauty: the magic of how the mysterious web of veins that laced the tiniest leaf reflected the nourishing rivers and their tributaries; of how the trajectory of the sun was reflected in the petals of the flaming lilies, the chromatic scales of sunrise and sunset; of how the words of strangers were indecipherable until in their wind-beaten, sunburnt faces I recognized the eyes of old friends. It became as clear as the open sky, that we, everything and everyone on this planet, we were all but drops in the same ocean, each carrying the whole ocean in us, the whole of us that was nothing but all of us.
It was almost as if I had had to be overwhelmed by nature’s immensity to notice its beauty reflected in the tiny things as well: in the little nondescript birds, in the black beetles and ants and the unassuming flowers that grew by the railway tracks, and which, upon closer inspection, carried in them the sunbeams. My miserable dandelions were as precious as the mysterious Edelweiss. And as important – they aerate and fertilize the soil with their sprawling roots, as I learned. They are essential – imagine the sun, imagine the rain on arid land.
To feel on par with a dandelion was not a humbling experience – it was a privilege. It is an experience reserved to the privileged. The absence of nature was not a human condition, but a question of wealth, of possibilities, of who gets to live in the flowery gardens and country villas, and who gets to crowd the townships that lack garbage collection and functioning sanitary installations. When did nature turn into a luxury good? When did nature – the natural world – turn into a commodity, into Marxian capital: a factor of production, a social relation. The dandelions by the railway tracks were indeed Che Guevara’s compañeras.
2.
By the turn of the millennium, I moved from the gloomy quarter of my childhood to a leafy upscale neighbourhood in a traffic-calming-zone. From my window I watch the tits fluttering in the trees. Only, there aren’t many birds. Every year, spring is getting more and more silent, and I have a feeling of loss and being lost. But by now, the uneasy strangeness I remember from my youth has grown into a sense of doom.
The dropping number of wildlife due to the drastic change of our ecosystem due to fossil fuels is well documented and daily reiterated in the news. We are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction – the successive loss of the world’s species, which of course includes the human species. When did “climate change”, which called for “Save The Whales” and paper recycling and Kumbaya, turn into “climate collapse”, which calls for immediate action, an instantly applicable survival plan, which nobody seems to have, or nobody dares to implement. Is it only me who feels the ground shifting, sliding away underneath my feet, as if in this giant hourglass we call the Earth’s atmosphere time is running out? Why is nobody screaming in panic when they read the news?
Because 1,5degree doesn’t mean a thing. Because 420ppm doesn’t mean a thing. Because 70% of wildlife lost in 50 years doesn’t mean a thing. It’s not (only) lethargy, or (only) generational egoism, and (only partly) the smug conviction that whoever gets washed away by the looming Deluge is part of another species, not Homo Suburbia, not Homo Lamborghinis, not Homo Private Yachtis. It’s not even denial in the face of death. It’s because we, Homo sapiens, are not capable of seeing it, hearing it, feeling it. We simply cannot grasp a thing as big and total, as out of proportion like Mass Extinction.
Before I moved in, the Austrian philosopher Günther Anders got to watch the birds from this window. There were many more birds then, of course, and I like to imagine the old man being woken by the call of the black redstarts and song thrushes. Anders spent his last decade here, until his death at the age of 90, in 1992. A student of Husserl and Heidegger, and the first husband of Hannah Arendt, he had fled the Nazis in 1933 and settled in California before returning to Europe in 1950. In his long life he witnessed WWI, Hitler, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the unleashing of both technology and consumerism, and climate change. To him, all these things have one thing in common: they are too big for us to grasp. They’re manmade, yet exceed our imagination.
Until what Anders called the year zero of the Calamity, 1945, human imagination had always surpassed human capacity. We were unable to do, produce, effect anything we couldn’t imagine beforehand. We could die and we could kill, and we could smell the blood, and feel heartbeats fade, and watch eyes pale. We could feel responsible, and we could be held accountable. Until the unimaginable happened: the dropping of the nuclear bomb. Suddenly, humans were able to extinct the entire human species, or any other species. Since 1945 we live with the constant danger of DIY annihilation. We are suicide bombers, and not only the doomsday clock is drawing close to midnight. The years since are what Anders called “the last chapter of history”, with which he referred to both a pending nuclear as well as ecological apocalypse. Not coincidentally, this period is also what geologists roughly define as the beginning of a new era: The Anthropocene, the shaping of Earth by homo sapiens.
Anders wondered how we, homo sapiens, are morally equipped to deal with the consequences of our newly gained godlike capabilities. “How was it possible”, he asked after interviewing the Hiroshima bomber, Claude Eatherly, that “the amount of wickedness required to accomplish the ultimate crime, a disproportionate crime, was equal to zero’?” It is possible, he concluded, because we find ourselves rendered innocent and unaccountable by a giant, smooth-running system called division of labour.
The act of production and the actual product are distanced in both space and time so that both are but an abstraction – as are their environmental consequences. Machines have turned human work, an act of craftmanship and selfrealisation, into meaningless repetitive tasks.
Technology will render humans obsolete, Anders wrote in 1956, in his main oeuvre The Outdatedness of Humans. Just as we cut our ties with nature, and went on to eradicate the natural world, so will AI eradicate homo sapiens. Not in one giant apocalypse, but little by little.
„The further the technical progress, the less possible is our chance to catch up with machines that have long outgrown us and escaped our control,” Anders said. The tools will have taken over. Fast forward a century of technological advance and the advent of computer aided design and artificial intelligence, the machines are now the proud inventors and creators we once were.
Sticks and stones once helped us survive in a world that scared us, and in its immensity made us feel small and insignificant. If once we were awed by nature’s phenomena and whatever gods or sprites we believed them to be, we are now awed by our own creations. We feel imperfect, messy, and stupid, inferior not to God, but to our Golem, technology. Anders called this the Promethean Shame.
As once were our gods, now computers are immortal, while our aching, aging bodies remind us of our transience. Humiliated by the ephemerality of our lives, we value the made more than the born. We rely on filters when we present our faces online, and trust ChatGTP more than our brains. We prize sober rationality above empathy; we organize ourselves by exact timetables and imperturbable routines, guided by output and intake, searching for the truth in numbers and facts hard like stone.
I am reminded of my visit to David in Florence. Michelangelo chiselled the statue in 1504, from a block of Carrara marble he considered imperfect: full of tiny holes and blackish veins. Yet, Michelangelo created a perfect sculpture of a young man that in his beauty and youth outshone anyone born from flesh. That is most evident in direct comparison to the throngs of tourists, sweaty and tired and red from sunburn, that are most efficiently pushed through the museum like goods on a conveyor belt. David on the contrary was divine: forever young and hence immortal.
Human desire for immortality, and the pronounced distaste for ageing has always propelled inventions and technological progress. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel are investing heavily in AI-driven biotechnology companies that research the reversal of the second law of thermodynamics: by cryogenics – the freezing of bodyparts, most notably severed heads to wait for technical progress; by epigenetics – the changing of the DNA that determines ageing; and by transhumanism – the infiltrating of nanobots into the human body that will control and restore body functions and ultimate replacing them. Inevitably, the human body will be rendered obsolete.
What was Science Fiction a few decades ago, is now a promising or frightening, you decide, forecast. At one point in time, it will be possible to download the human brain onto a cloud, our mortal bodies shed like snakeskin. Immortality means the overcoming of our physical restrictions, of the natural world, and finally of matter. Unlike perfect David, who is forever wedded to the imperfect marble of Carrara.
Yet even if we don’t long for eternal life, to simply manage our daily lives we (must) rely on technology. Every household appliance come with a set of programmes we hardly comprehend let alone master, and our smartphones have long outwitted us. Our present state of the art most has made most of us technological illiterates, and the rift between technology and those at their mercy is continually widening. We let machines guide us, command us, make our decisions. The more sophisticated our machines – what cynic euphemism – the dumber we become. In turn, our machines, our computers, have made us their caretakers, their maintenance workers, their sticks and stones; soon they’ll replace us with more advanced technology.
Modern life has alienated us from the natural world for a long time. Wasn’t the concrete jungle of my youth an old-fashioned, analogue forerunner of today’s cyber space? As I have felt at home in the rectangular confinement of the inner city, and frightened by the wilderness, many feel at home in the virtual safety of the internet, more alive, truer, in the illusion of their improved selves: their meticulously styled profile pics, their polished timelines. Mentally, we have long moved out of our planet, and the natural world has long turned from our “home” to real estate on a seller’s market.
With climate change, pollution, deforestation, pandemics and population growth, our planet is becoming increasingly precarious, the late scientist Stephen Hawking, said. If we are to survive, we must leave Earth within the next 100 years.
So that’s why there are no undertakings to “save the planet”. Like a building earmarked for demolition, its valuables, the carbon, oil, minerals, have long been sold, its residents expelled. Its animals forsaken, its insects and molluscs and funghi forsaken. Its trees and flowers and mosses and rivers and lakes, forsaken. Its humans, forsaken. All eight billion of us that make up the 99.9% that won’t fly to outer space.
From my window I watch a solitary blue tit in the snow-covered tree outside. All blustered up in the freezing January cold. It’s not for granted he will live to see spring. The little bird reminds of the many bird species gone extinct in the last few years. The long meaningless lists of Latin names: anodorhynchus glaucus, vanellus macropterus, charmosyna diadema. How many times, I wonder, had I not been aware of seeing the last of their kind in Austria. The Blue Roller. The red-footed falcon, the great Bustard. Otis tardis, coracias garrulus, falco vespertinus. Maybe this will be the last blue tit? I should cherish the moment. Because there is really nothing I can do, if we can do anything.
The problem, Günther Anders said, is that we believe to be entitled to do anything of which we are capable. My neighbours, who still knew him, told me that he was friendly man, funny, the proverbial scatter-brained professor. I wonder how he kept his spirits up, and remained, despite all, a kind man. The last of his kind. They don’t make them like him anymore.
3.
On the death row they are free to decide / if the beans for their last meal / Will be served sweet or sour.
With this snippet from an actual newspaper report, Günther Anders opened the introduction to his Outdatedness of Human Beings. While he lived in California, during the 1940s and early 1950s, the beginning of the economic boom, the teens of the Calamity, the beginning of the Anthropocene, he witnessed also the birth of consumerism.
To be is to buy. Consumerism is our illusion of free will, our last resort in a world meticulously controlled. It is our retail therapy for Promethean shame. It is the lure and fuel of capitalism, with economic growth the magic formula, or rather the source code. To keep their economies going, even nations that are already rich to meet the demands of all, need to keep expanding. When pointless consumption is the means and the end of our economy, it is matter-of-factly impossible to keep our planet from being consumed.
Neither as work force nor as consumers can we escape the order of our capitalist society, which, like technology, has infiltrated every aspect of our lives. If our choices are so limited, how can we possibly feel responsible for climate collapse when all we do is to commute to work, eat dinner and make a holiday once a year? Tied to ever-accelerating treadmills – some with carrots on sticks, some with just the sticks – how can we be held accountable for the dying of the coral reefs? How can we even imagine that simply by living, by struggling through life, by our actions that were never intended to do any harm, we commit genocide and ecocide, we extinct nations and species. And yet we do. We kill the bees if we eat steak, but we don’t save them if we don’t.
If we feel trapped, in this absurd game of hopscotch, it’s because this society, capitalist, consumerist, technological, individualistic, has become as ungraspable as its products and consequences. We believe to have choices, we believe to express ourselves in the purchases we make; In reality, we only crave chocolate in our bewilderment, stunned by the oxymoron of being as redundant as essential, as workers and as consumers. We feel reduced to ants, crawling towards a goal that never moves closer, as spring gets a little more silent each year and the flowers don’t grow back.
“If I have come before you, it is in order to reverse time, to mourn tomorrow’s dead today.”
Günther Anders wanted us to refuse to collaborate with the oppressive order, he wanted us to create our forms of resistance. He would want us to panic now. He would have been an activist, in the vein of Just Stop Oil (or the other way round), or as his biographer Christian Dries said: He could have been Greta Thunberg’s grandfather. Günther Anders would have wanted us to be the flowers of spring.
Michelangelo sculpted David’s right hand disproportionately big, a pointer towards human agency and human self-determination. Man is the measure of all things was the slogan of the Renaissance, the literal reawakening of science, and the upending of a strict religious order as the class of citizens and merchants was wedged in between God and nobles and peasants. It was then that mercantilism and imperialism started, nationalism, and the first factories. David was also the beginning of an era that ended with the total exhaustion of our planet. Maybe the oversized hand was a bad omen. But maybe, in a different light, it is a reminder that we must get our agency back.
I admire the climate activists, especially since I feel so paralyzed. To me, climate collapse is a matter of collective guilt that calls for collective responsibility, and collective action. But isn’t it this collective that’s gone missing in a society that isolated us in our egocentricity, in the improvement not of our selves but our appearances, the perfect trajectories of our careers, in the belief in the law of jungle, the survival of the fittest, the right of the strongest and the winner takes it all. In my darkest hours of climate anxiety or self-flagellation, I must remind myself that none of us can shoulder the guilt of climate collapse on their own. Nor can we stop it – on our own.
It’s not a bad thing to be embedded in strong network. Mtu Ni Watu is a Swahili proverb I learned on my travels through Africa. It means one is many or a person is a people, and it’s taken quite literally in the villages, where extended families of four generations or more live under the same roof. Where everybody chips in. Where there are no homes for old people, or orphanages, or homeless shelters. Where life is governed by solidarity and community, not by personal forthcoming and ambition. The term Ubuntu for humanity in the Bantu languages contains the values of communality, respect, dignity, acceptance, sharing, co-responsibility, fairness, compassion, and conciliation. Those who don’t live up to these ideals are not regarded human. Imagine the humanists of the European Renaissance would have had that in mind – what would Michelangelo’s David have looked like? And what would the world look like now?
4
Isn’t it ironic, funny almost, that after homo sapiens lived on our planet for 300,000 years, it was a system designed to serve humans, that will have so rapidly led to our extinction? Anthropocentricism has governed our civilization for the past 12.000 years. It was either a by-product or the very basis or our sedentary, agricultural civilizations, which brought about monotheism and the first notion of property: of land, of animals, of other people; Anthropocentrism means that the world is at our command, at our disposal.
But then again, it’s not so funny if we narrow down our definition of anthropocentricity to what it has really stood for all the time: In the holy scriptures, in the declaration of the rights of man and citizen, in the entire history of our Western civilization, anthropocentricity never meant Human is the measure of all things. It included only meant Man. White Man. Western white men. Western white Heterosexual Man. Western white heterosexual able-bodied Man, and so on. Not funny at all that the overwhelming majority of us, who to varying degrees do not fall into these categories, and who hence (to varying degrees) never benefiting from this system but were discriminated are getting extinct, too; humans and non-humans alike, for the follies of so few of us (who will most likely soon board their spaceships, at least their frozen heads.)
But what if this man isn’t the measure of all things? What if this man isn’t the pinnacle of creation? What if this man doesn’t even represent human nature, nor nature at all? What’s all this talk of the lion king, while it’s rarely one, but mostly two or more lions (brothers or friends) who make sure to mate with the same females to start a pride, and the pride is essentially matriarchal in its organization? Why don’t we see that solidarity among animals counterbalances competition and that natural selection was driven by beauty as much as strength, as ornithologist Richard Prum revealed, and when Darwin spoke of the fittest, he never meant the strongest, but those who fit into their environment like a hand in a glove.
What I’m saying is, that this wicked web we are caught in is the illusions and abstractions that the powerful have created and imposed on the rest of humanity, as a foundation of racism and discrimination, of social injustice, and imperialism and totalitarianism. It’s a “system” as intricate and all-embracing as our ecosystem, but its reversal, its negative.
In order to address climate collapse I believe we have to readjust our view of the world. We have to re-evaluate our concepts of nature, and of our nature, and what we are entitled to.
Which turns out to be a lot. If we aren’t as we are told we are – greedy, destructive individuals – then we don’t need to protect nature from us. We don’t even need to restrain ourselves; we just need to act true to our nature. Which we cannot do as long as we are caught in this dark place where our actions don’t make a difference one way or the other.
Instead, we must first learn to change from those, who as American writer Rebecca Solnit eloquently put it, climate despair is a luxury: the marginalized, the oppressed, the others.
The San were such others, a group of nomadic tribes of hunters and gatherers that for thousands and thousands of years roamed the savannas and deserts of Southern Africa. After the arrival of the colonizers in the 19th century, who expelled them from their ancestral lands that where suddenly private possessions, it was only a question of decades that their numbers were so drastically reduced, their languages and their cultures lost, that by today we can safely consider them extinct through cultural genocide. But the San are more than just another disappearing indigenous people.
The savannas of Southern Africa were the cradle of humanity, it was from here that homo sapiens spread out all over the world and eventually started agricultural societies. The San never turned to a sedentary lifestyle, but remained unchanged, while the empires of the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Huns, the Ottomans and you name it, crumbled and fell. Because the San lived sustainably: in perfect harmony with the natural environment. They fitted like hands into a glove.
Apart from cave paintings and rock engravings that date up to ten thousand years ago, they left no trace. I visited these paintings and engravings in Namibia and Zimbabwe, and I caught a glimpse of how they, and we, as the species homo sapiens, once saw the world.
The San were so deeply immersed in the natural world, they were inseparable from it, the lines blurred between human and non-human world: The rocks and plants and animals were an extension of their personalities so they seemed to live outside the confinements of their physical bodies. Everything to them was animated, and everything was reciprocal.
In the cave paintings, they depicted themselves as half human, half animal creatures, or half human half plants. To kill an animal meant killing a part of oneself, to eat a root meant incorporating the root, become the tree, to be eaten by an animal meant living on as a lion; to dream like a lion, to run like a kudu, to fly like bee. For the San the spear never went one direction only.
I’m not saying we should go back to hunting and gathering. History was not a downward spiral. Progress and technology have afforded us so many things I don’t want to miss and the enlightenment has brought more wealth and health for all, and education and science. But we must let ourselves be reminded of what we lost on the long way, and what we cannot go on without.
What I consider to be the most important lesson the San taught me, is their concept of death: their inability to escape it, but their ability to integrate it. They didn’t worship immortality for the individual, but searched to be blended into a world that would last forever. Imagine there were no place called away, no place called nowhere – for there really isn’t such a thing on this planet. We cannot dispose of things. The dumps, where we forget our old cars and washing machines, our second-hand clothes, are the slums on the other side of the planet. I imagine a world where in the shops we are paid for picking up items, but we must pay if we ever want to get rid of them, because these things will never disappear, but cling to us like leeches.
Because everything we interact with – knowingly or not – changes us as much as we change it. The lines between hunter and prey, between buyer and product, or maker and product, between subject and object aren’t as clear cut as we were made to believe. We cannot see the other, without being seen. We cannot even see ourselves but in the eyes on the other. We cannot eat, without being eaten, kill without dying.
And then we would realize that everything is animated – the cosy sweater we bought yesterday holds a sheep in Australia, and a textile worker in a Bangladeshi sweat shop, and it holds the Indian ocean and the container ship and the dirty fuel oil, it holds the illegal immigrant worker in the port of Genova, and the part-time salesperson at H&M, a single parent who fails to heat their apartment. And it’s winter.
The spear doesn’t fly one way only. The phenomenologists, philosophers like Anders, thought that the precision of our language doesn’t reflect these constant, messy interactions, that are inexpressible in numbers and hard facts. To describe the world, to express truth, these sober thinkers preferred art and poetry to the exact language of science.
Because in the end we are not machines, brains that compute, and bodies that burn fuel into waste, but creative creatures, striving for beauty, not perfection. And we are not entangled in a web, but we make up the web. We are the world, because we are part of it; and we are part of nature, and we are the system that bore us. Then we can love our aching, aging imperfect bodies. And we could understand that nature is not pristine Alps and untouched wilderness. It’s flawed with rambling veins and holes in it, and it’s old and mortal, and it’s never perfect. Nature our messy home: it’s also pigeons in the backstreets and crows on the rooftops, it’s dandelions by the railway tracks. Nature is what Darwin called our extended phenotype: like a spider would be nothing without its web, so we are nothing without our planet, the natural world, and nature, really, would be nothing without us.
And how you delight the heart
Of the flowers
When towards you
They stretch their tender arms
(Friedrich Hölderin, ca 1800)