But when critics of Al Gore compare his electricity use to that of the average Ugandan, they are not ultimately highlighting conspicuous and hypocritical personal consumption, however they mean to disparage him. Instead, they are calling attention to the structure of a political and economic order that not only permits the disparity but feeds and profits from it—this is what Thomas Piketty calls the “apparatus of justification.” And it justifies quite a lot. If the world’s most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent. We won’t get there through the dietary choices of individuals, but through policy changes. In an age of personal politics, hypocrisy can look like a cardinal sin; but it can also articulate a public aspiration. Eating organic is nice, in other words, but if your goal is to save the climate your vote is much more important. Politics is a moral multiplier. And a perception of worldly sickness uncomplemented by political commitment gives us only “wellness.”
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It can be hard to take wellness seriously as a movement, at first, which may be why it has been the subject of so much derision over the past few years—SoulCycle, Goop, Moon Juice. But however manipulated by marketing consultants, and however dubious its claims to healthfulness, wellness also gives a clear name and shape to a growing perception even, or especially, among those wealthy enough to be insulated from the early assaults of climate change: that the contemporary world is toxic, and that to endure or thrive within it requires extraordinary measures of self-regulation and self-purification.
What has been called the “new New Age” arises from a similar intuition—that meditation, ayahuasca trips, crystals and Burning Man and microdosed LSD are all pathways to a world beckoning as purer, cleaner, more sustaining, and perhaps above all else, more whole. This purity arena is likely to expand, perhaps dramatically, as the climate continues to careen toward visible degradation—and consumers respond by trying to extract themselves from the sludge of the world however they can. It should not be a surprise to discover, in next year’s supermarket aisles, alongside labels for “organic” and “free range,” some food described as “carbon-free.” GMOs aren’t a sign of a sick planet but a possible partial solution to the coming crisis of agriculture; nuclear power the same for energy. But both have already become nearly as off-putting as carcinogens to the purity-minded, who are growing in number and channeling more and more ecological anxiety along the way.
That anxiety is coherent, even rational, at a time when it has been revealed that many American brand-name foods made from oats, including Cheerios and Quaker Oats, contain the pesticide Roundup, which has been linked with cancer, and when the National Weather Service issues elaborate guidance about which commonly available face masks can, and which cannot, protect you against the wildfire smoke engulfing nearly all of North America. It is only intuitive, in other words, that impulses toward purity represent growth areas of our culture, destined to distend further inward from the cultural periphery as apocalyptic ecological anxiety grows, too.
But conscious consumption and wellness are both cop-outs, arising from that basic promise extended by neoliberalism: that consumer choices can be a substitute for political action, advertising not just political identity but political virtue; that the mutual end-goal of market and political forces should be the effective retirement of contentious politics at the hand of market consensus, which would displace ideological dispute; and that, in the meantime, in the supermarket aisle or department store, one can do good for the world simply by buying well.
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The term “neoliberalism” has been a swear word, on the Left, only since the Great Recession. Before then it was, most of the time, mere description: of the growing power of markets, particularly financial markets, in the liberal democracies of the West over the second half of the twentieth century; and of the hardening centrist consensus within those countries committed to spreading that power, in the form of privatization, deregulation, corporate-friendly tax policy, and the promotion of free trade.
This program was sold, for fifty years, on the promise of growth—and not just growth for some. In this way, it was a sort of total political philosophy, extending a single, simple ideological tarpaulin so far and wide that it enclosed the earth like a rubbery blanket of greenhouse gas.
It was total in other ways as well, unable to adjust to meaningfully discriminate between experiences as divergent as post-crash England and post-Maria Puerto Rico, or to concede its own shortcomings and paradoxes and blind spots, proposing instead only more neoliberalism. This is how the forces that unleashed climate change—namely, “the unchecked wisdom of the market”—were nevertheless presented as the forces that would save the planet from its ravages. It is how “philanthrocapitalism,” which seeks profits alongside human benefits, has replaced the loss-leader model of moral philanthropy among the very rich; how the winners of our increasingly winner-take-all tournament economy use philanthropy to buttress their own status; how “effective altruism,” which measures even not-for-profit charity by metrics of return borrowed from finance, has transformed the culture of giving well beyond the billionaire class; and how the “moral economy,” a rhetorical wedge that once expressed a radical critique of capitalism, became the calling card of do-gooder capitalists like Bill Gates. It is also, on the other end of the pecking order, how struggling citizens are asked to be entrepreneurs, indeed to demonstrate their value as citizens with the hard work of entrepreneurship, in an exhausting social system defined above all else by relentless competition.
That is the critique from the Left, at least—and it is, in its way, inarguably true. But by laundering all conflict and competition through the market, neoliberalism also proffered a new model of doing business, so to speak, on the world stage—one that didn’t emerge from, or point toward, endless nation-state rivalry.
One should not confuse correlation with causation, especially since there was so much tumult coming out of World War II that it is hard to isolate the single cause of just about anything. But the international cooperative order that has since presided, establishing or at least emerging in parallel with relative peace and abundant prosperity, is very neatly historically coincident with the reign of globalization and the empire of financial capital we now group together as neoliberalism. And if one were inclined to confuse correlation with causation, there is a quite intuitive and plausible theory connecting them. Markets may be problematic, shall we say, but they also value security and stability and, all else being equal, reliable economic growth. In the form of that growth, neoliberalism promised a reward for cooperation, effectively transforming, at least in theory, what had once been seen as zero-sum competitions into positive-sum collaborations.
Neoliberalism never made good on that bargain, as the financial crisis finally revealed. Which has left the rhetorical banner of an ever-expanding, ever-enriching society of affluence—and a political economy oriented toward the same goal—considerably tattered. Those continuing to hold it aloft are much wobblier at the knee than seemed credible to imagine just a decade or two ago, like athletes showing themselves suddenly far past their prime. Global warming promises another blow, possibly a lethal one. If Bangladesh floods and Russia profits, the result will not be good for the cause of neoliberalism—and arguably worse still for the cause of liberal internationalism, which has always been its aide-de-camp.