Nature's Evil

New problems call for new ways of interpreting ancient arguments – and for acknowledging that some current ideas are obsolete while other long-forgotten theories are right up to the moment. Marx wrote, ‘primitive accumulation plays in political economy about the same part as original sin in theology.’ 10 With similar irony, Walter Benjamin imagined ‘historical materialism’ as ‘a puppet in Turkish attire’ whose master is theology, ‘small and ugly and … out of sight’. 11 Indeed, the history of matter is interdependent with the history of the spirit. From Luther to Swedenborg, and from the medieval alchemists to the Russian Old Believers, religious thinkers and dissenters were involved in extracting, processing and interpreting the gifts of nature (see chapter 6 ). From silk to sugar, and from gunpowder to oil, many of these commodities had oriental origins, like Benjamin’s puppet.

The historian is a prophet looking backwards, 12 but economists and sociologists often believe in presentism: you can only understand the present within its own context. While I don’t entirely share this belief, neither do I agree with the kind of historicism that says that today’s news is a development of yesterday’s trends. The most important news is not a development – it is a fresh start. Material history focuses on situations of change, moments of danger, states of emergency. Following Benjamin, my position also combines the philosophies of moralism and naturalism. Evil has its roots in nature, and nature also limits it. But the choice is ours; we are making it here and now, as we always have done. We do not know the outcomes of our current choices, but we know the consequences of those that people made in the past. Paradoxically, it is the uncertainty of the future that makes historical experience relevant for the present. The world is the unity of human beings and nature; and, since we have failed to change the world, now is the moment to understand how it works. In our gloomy age this is the task for a New Enlightenment.

The Age of Enlightenment culminated in a disaster. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 shook the world, inviting a re-evaluation of the nature of evil. If God created the earthquake, then he is either not omnipotent or not good. Among the survivors is the hero of Voltaire’s novel Candide, or Optimism . Candide, a sweet-natured youth, believes everything his tutor, the philosopher Pangloss, tells him: ‘It is demonstrable, that things cannot be otherwise than as they are … Stones were made to be hewn … Pigs were made to be eaten … Individual misfortunes lead to the common good, so the worse such misfortunes, the better.’ But then the tutor falls ill with syphilis and witnesses the death of 30,000 people in Lisbon. Candide flees to Eldorado, where golden fountains flow with rum, and then to the Dutch colony of Surinam. On a sugar plantation he meets a black slave, who lost his hand when it was crushed by a millstone. He tried to run away and had his leg cut off. ‘This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe,’ says the black man. He doesn’t know the word ‘optimism’, and Candide explains: ‘it is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong.’ 1 3

Notes

Notes

1   Tacitus, The Annals , Book 6, secs 13, 19; Panchenko, ‘Tiberius i finansovyi krizis v Rime’. 2   Auty, Resource Abundance and Economic Development ; Dunning, Crude Democracy . 3   Sraffa, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities . 4   On the staple theory, see Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada , and Watson, Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis ; on the fetishism of commodities, see Marx, Capital , and Pietz, ‘Fetishism and materialism’. 5   Latour, Politics of Nature , p. 33. 6   Hardin, ‘The tragedy of the commons’. 7   Cannan, ‘The origin of the law of diminishing returns’; Rainert, How Rich Countries Have Been Enriched ; Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism . 8   Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace , in Collected Writings , Vol. 2, p. 6. 9   Two books were the most significant for the material turn: Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel , and Mitchell, Carbon Democracy . See also Bennett, Vibrant Matter ; Miller, Cultural Histories of the Material World ; LeCain, The Matter of History . 10  Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, p. 784. 11  Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’, in Selected Writings , p. 389. 12 Ibid., p. 405. 13  Voltaire, Candide , p. 2.