Here’s a sentence I never expected I would say: I’m really enjoying and even understanding parts of the Latour’s Gifford lectures.
Of all of the lectures that we have covered so far, lecture five, War of Humans and Earthbound, has been my favorite. I’m not sure if this is because I have a better understanding of the material, because Latour is finally making more sense, or because he touched on some concepts that I am somewhat familiar with but the class discussion and questions that came out of it were more concrete than any of the previous classes.
As the name implies, Latecture (Latour Lecture) five was all about war, or at least the idea of war. The main gist of the piece was that we cannot expect that everything will turn out okay or that some higher Gaiaesque power will swoop in and save us because they will not and it will not. To make change occur, we need to do what we have been saying we have needed to do for decades in regards to environmental issues, act. Here, Latour’s idea of war is introduced.
To entice action, Latour uses the charged term war, but not in a way that it is commonly used. Instead of declaring that we environmentally-conscious few need to fight against the ignorant majority, Latour believes that a war exists between those who are acting and those who know there is a problem but are doing nothing about it. In the case of climate change, he even makes the argument that people who think that action should be taken but do not take that action themselves are worse than climate deniers. Fighting with each other, Latour says, is better than thinking all of humanity is in the same boat and dealing with the same issues.
Humans and Earthbound are the soldiers in this conflict. To Latour, Humans are the enemy. They are nature-centric without understanding what that implies or even means. The Earthbound on the other hand understand their place in the world and accept their limits not to constrict themselves, but to better inform their actions.
It was really fun to talk about all of this and go back and forth in small groups and then the bigger class but my favorite part of the discussion what our expectations for lecture 6. There were some great questions posed, mine asked how the ideas that we have been trudging though could be more readily communicated to people outside of the class (my mom for example).
I’m excited to see what Latour has in store for the final Latecture and hope he has a few tricks up his sleeves for tying everything together.
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