SOCIOCENTRISM, THE ANTHROPOCENE, AND THE PLANETARY

Michel Foucault explored the politics of the disciplinary society within enclosed institutions such as monasteries, madhouses, prisons, factories, schools, and localities. Later he began to address the related politics of impersonal control by which the behavior of entire constituencies is channeled in some directions rather than others. From disciplines within closed institutions to impersonal, probabilistic controls distributed across an entire regime. The simplest model of the latter would be an air terminal where people appear to be running around in different directions even as the plane schedules and gate locations pull them into discernible patterns. A street version would be an array of cameras, cops, arrest records, and traffic signs in the inner city that record anonymous movements, regulate trajectories, and create police questioning of "suspicious people." The patterns of control that emerge are probabilistic because they establish general trends while many escape, ignore, bypass, or flout them. I use the word discipline to capture both modes of containment: the institutional politics of normalization and the probabilistic processes of impersonal regulation.

I also need to explore diverse models of belonging that have attracted different thinkers and constituencies to this or that mode of discipline. The idea is to discern how diverse practices of belonging, while competing with each other, have often also commonly participated in what I call sociocentrism. In its most extreme form, sociocentrism is the propensity to interpret or explain social processes by reference to other social processes alone. It is often connected to perspectives that treat nature as a set of resources to extract. A less dramatic version occurs when you acknowledge that this or that social order is profoundly affected by its climate, fauna, and soil systems but act as if that environment is set on long, slow time. A more attenuated version yet is when you acknowledge that capitalism has become a geologic force exerting profound effects on climate and many other features of the environment but ignore or minimize the self-organizing amplifiers and internal volatilities of planetary processes themselves. Yet another version is to acknowledge modes of self-organization in species evolution but to minimize such capacities — and the periodic volatilities attached to them — with respect to climate, oceans, glacier flows, and the like.

Sociocentrism is often bound to notions of human exceptionalism and nature as a deposit of resources to use and master; in it humans are treated as the only entitled agents in the world. Those themes in turn are often linked to specific visions of freedom and belonging to the world. To dramatize diverse renditions of the connections among sociocentrism, exceptionalism, freedom, and belonging I focus on four classic models that competed for hegemony before the actual and potential ravages of climate change were widely recognized. The affinities across radical difference among Rousseau, Isaiah Berlin, Hayek, and Marx may help us to see how much work must still be done to reconfigure sociocentrism, human exceptionalism, and dominant modes of belonging. Where pertinent, I will note recent work within the relevant traditions that begin to make the needed adjustments.

Belonging to a Free Nation

Foucault, of course, was not the first Western thinker to study discipline in relation to freedom. Rousseau did so when he asked, in The Government of Poland, how to lift an entire population in an autocratic setting geographically vulnerable to invasion into a unified, territorial state in which each adult male member could eventually hope to become a qualified citizen of the nation. His goal was to bring a territorial people to a point where their national mode of belonging could set the unreflective background from which the free participation of all could proceed. Freedom through national identification and regimentation, you might say. The goal was to bring freedom, participation, belonging together into the nation.

Because of contingencies of history — which included the large size of the territory, its climate, and its geographic vulnerability to invasion — the Polish people were not yet ready to become citizens of a democratic nation, in Rousseau's judgment. A host of state and local disciplines were needed to lift them gradually to the necessary level of political intelligence, local initiative, and national belonging. Each young male Pole, for instance, was to serve in the militia for a short period. Such service would ensure the defense of the country against predatory powers such as Russia; it would promote male identification with the nation; and the short-term character of the service would curtail the danger a standing military poses to the spirit of the nation.

The leaders of the nation-in-waiting should also set a national style of dress. This would discourage people from becoming attracted to those from other countries and, in general, discourage cross-national travel, sexual intercourse, and marriage. Landholdings should be reduced from their current size, which made land available only to a few, and gradually distributed much more broadly. This feat would decrease the power of the nobility and prepare peasants to become citizens through identification with the nation. Yearly festivals were to be held to dramatize the nation; at these festivals a few members who had demonstrated love of country were to be lifted to full citizenship during a public ceremony. Rousseau loved public ceremonies.

Paper money was to be eliminated because it allows lords and entrepreneurs to transfer holdings outside the territory and because the very mobility of money creates financial bubbles that eventually burst. Rousseau was a smart guy. Get rid of paper money, he said, if you seek to generate probable behavior conducive to formation of an egalitarian nation. Rousseau believed in private property, but he was not a capitalist theorist of endless growth. His Discourse on Political Economy, for instance, celebrated small, privately owned farms and campaigned against the fetish of economic growth. The latter project always works against equality.

Men were to be retained as the official head of each family so that internal conflicts within families were curtailed and so that internal family disputes would not spill over into the common life. Even if the innate differences between men and women were minor, Rousseau insisted, the male gender must prevail in order to foster the unity of the family. The power of the Catholic Church — a church Rousseau did not admire — was to be decreased gradually so as to reduce conflicts it might pose to the unity of the nation. Its historic...