“The worst is not for tomorrow, it is already here”

The scale of the California fires is once again sounding the alarm of the climate emergency. For philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, such a situation also reflects the need to rethink the current exploitation of earth’s resources.

En October 2023, in homage to his friend Bruno Latour (1947-2022), the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk published a short story whose title, at the time of the Californian fires, resonates strongly: Prometheus’ Remorse. From the gift of fire to global destruction by fire. The history of humanity, Sloterdijk considers, is that of the various uses of fire. Fossil fuels have changed the situation and threaten life on Earth. It is therefore urgent to consider a new energy pacifism.

What was your first thought about the Los Angeles fires?
Prophets who announce misfortune should not want to be right. However, in our mental or sentimental equipment, there is always this perverse reflex which consists of thinking: “I told you so a long time ago. » When the worst really happens, the will to not have been right must be reestablished. We cannot have wanted this catastrophe. The German physicist and thinker Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912-2007), who participated in atomic research during the Second World War, developed a thought in the 1970s on the responsibility of knowledge, evoking the concept of premonitory disaster. For him, humanity does not only learn rationally; a sort of pedagogy through disaster is also necessary, and it arises from critical situations, which are alerts. However, given what is happening in California, we can no longer speak of an alert, because the disaster is not coming tomorrow, it is already here.

In your trilogy of Spheres, you evoke in particular a humanity which faces the’existential insecurity through multiple protective bubbles. Didn’t the rich of Los Angeles feel like they were living in a bubble of wealth?
The rich certainly have the feeling of being better protected than the rest of the world. But there are many of us on Earth who think we will be spared. Look at what is happening in Italy, at the foot of Vesuvius. Everyone knows that a major eruption will occur in the near future, but construction continues around the volcano. This is a behavior that Nietzsche characterized in his work Human, too human. Human beings cannot distinguish between risk and danger. In the absence of near and immediate danger, he takes risks. Risk involves the probability of failure or damage, which can be assessed statistically. But unlike danger, it cannot be felt and arouse fear. We therefore take risks without seeing the danger, and this makes us inconsistent, frivolous…

California, from the start, is a fantasy. We wanted to build a civilization from nothing, in a hostile place.

However, there is no longer any uncertainty about the disasters that we create, linked to the climatic imbalances caused by the uncontrolled emission of greenhouse gases. L’scientific alert is global…
And that doesn’t change anything, we continue! Why would this change? Almost all nations on Earth are moving toward the model of material well-being found among Americans and Europeans. A model of civilization of modest living does not exist. The orientation towards wealth, strength, the limitless exploitation of the Earth’s resources, the extraction of fossil fuels and minerals, will continue. And that puts us at immense risk.

Essentially because we persist, as you remind us, in burning the forests of the past?
Very few people are aware that for two hundred years we have been burning underground forests which took tens of millions of years to be petrified and liquefied in the form of coal, oil and gas. These original forests were brought into the industrial here and now by countless fires fueling machines. In the 19th century, noting the extraordinary influx of energy that coal brought to steam engines, contemporaries called them “fire machines”. An English economist had calculated that, to obtain the same effect with wood, it would have been necessary to burn an area of ​​forest two and a half times larger than the United Kingdom each year…

For six thousand years, cities have been built around water. However, Los Angeles was created in a desert, the water was brought there by a canal which dried up a large lake…
California, from the start, is a fantasy. We wanted to build a civilization from nothing, in a hostile place. This is a bit like what happened in Russia during the time of Peter the Great, when he decided to build a capital on the shores of the Baltic Sea, where it is dark half the year. There is always a revolutionary component in human action. Unlike St. Petersburg, California created a civilization in a solarium, which is being repeated today in the Gulf countries, where Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Salman has just inaugurated the artificial island of Sindalah, the first project of a futuristic megalopolis.

The heyday of what you call the “Babylonian entertainment industries”?
In Berlin, I have just moved, and I live among boxes of books. Two or three works by André Gorz (1923-2007), a great theorist of political ecology and degrowth, fell into my hands, notably those where he discusses the entertainment society and very violently criticizes the influence of private mobility. He speaks of an alternative life that would somewhat resemble medieval monastic life, a modest life that could be shared by all. I just found it at a second-hand bookstore The Paths to Paradise. The agony of capital, which he wrote forty years ago. There is nothing so foreign to the spirit of our times as this idea of ​​eco-socialism.

As long as the question of fire, of combustion in general, is not resolved, we will not escape the risk of the extinction of humanity.

So we have not entered the era of “Promethean remorse”?
If ! Prometheism (1) is the remains of an industrial era which began in the last quarter of the 17th century, with the steam engine, these famous “fire machines”, and which found its symbolic apogee in the tower Eiffel, built to celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution, which was to be destroyed after the Universal Exhibition of 1889 and which has just been repainted for the twenty-fifth time. Quite a symbol!

For me, as long as the question of fire, of combustion in general, born with the industrial revolution, is not resolved, we will not escape the risk of the extinction of humanity. Do you remember the Around the world in eighty days, by Jules Verne? We are currently in the situation of this famous traveler, Phileas Fogg, who offers 60,000 dollars to Captain Speedy – an American, who cannot resist money… – to burn the wood of his steamboat so that it speeds up to arrive in London on time. It’s a beautiful metaphor for what we’re experiencing. Humanity today is a collective of arsonists. Let us not forget that the vanguard of the proletariat were the coal miners. Fossil energy is at the heart of the progressive movement, and the last major workers’ strikes were those of miners during the era of Margaret Thatcher. She really understood that it was necessary to kill the vanguard of the workers’ movement. We then killed the typographers. The former produced energy, the latter, information. These two workers’ vanguards have disappeared.

So… “what to do?” » – if we want to parody Lenin during his exile in Germany?
We must think about regaining knowledge and energy production. I believe that we must follow the direction of my friend Bruno Latour, who formulated the postulate of a rising ecological class, of a young and committed avant-garde. I do not believe in the more violent action advocated by Swedish climate activist Andreas Malm. Of course, in France, you always have an atmosphere quite conducive to revolt, sparks fly. But in most European countries, this atmosphere of revolt hardly exists, or, at worst, it is channeled by the far right, which gives the impression that the revolution has changed sides. At the moment everyone is afraid, and in an atmosphere of fear it is very difficult to conceive ideas. But we have no choice, we must continue to think and act to put out the fires.

Prometheus’ Remorse. From the gift of fire to global destruction by fire, ed Payot, 2023, 130 p., €10.