Eisenstein's Theory of Relativism

Why his "conspiritual" approach to the ecological crisis doesn't help us

Tens of thousands of dead fish washed up on the Texas shore last weekend: Just one ancillary, unpredicted effect of climate change.

Last time, I started to explore my affinities as well as my difficulties with Charles Eisenstein’s work. I find myself compelled to do this for a number of reasons. Probably the main one is that Charles, as a thinker, explores many of the same areas I do and we often reach similar conclusions. There is a great deal of overlap in our thinking. Yet at the same time, I believe we have major differences. By looking more deeply at Charles’ ideas, I hope to interrogate and sharpen my own views.

Personally, I believe in the necessity of criticism and I think we need more of it. Those of us who write, think, philosophize outside of the institutional structures of the mainstream media and the academy sorely lack a critical infrastructure in which our works get evaluated. I also want to take a different path of critique than the approach found in Derek Beres, Julian Walker and Matthew Remski’s Conspirituality — both the book and the podcast — which violently rejects anything intangible, unquantifiable, or esoteric. They often resort, also, to caricature and ridicule.

Let’s start with Charles’ Climate: A New Story, indicative of his conceptual approach. I struggled with this book when I first read it, and, reading it again, I still have big problems with it. At the same time, the book has beautiful passages and offers some good ideas. I will start with my problems and then look at the parts that inspire me.

‘Climate: A New Story’ from MidJourney

Near the beginning, Charles writes: “From what state of being do we extinguish other species, ruin earth and sea, and treat nature as a collection of resources to be allocated for maximum short-term benefit? It can come only from the constriction, numbing, and diversion of our capacity to feel empathy and love.” For me, his rhetorics fall flat. Humans generally act for short-term benefit without even thinking about it. This doesn’t mean we don’t feel love or empathy. Our ancient ancestors — who, presumably, lived in tight knit indigenous communities with animistic beliefs and a sacred relationship to nature — hunted the megafauna to extinction. Our brains and hearts are not intrinsically different from theirs.

What “we” lack, today, is a shared, coherent, systems-level understanding that takes deep time as well as accelerating ecological feedback loops into account. As Buckminster Fuller explored in his work, this is not something that evolution simply gives to us. It is a faculty we must develop by pushing against the current. Throughout the book, I find Charles misses the target.

The main idea of Climate: A New Story is that the environmental movement’s single-minded focus on rapidly reducing atmospheric carbon levels is too narrow and, also, it doesn’t work. Charles argues that we need, instead, a more holistic, indigenous-inspired approach that not only recognizes the incalculable value of intact forests and wetlands, but also approaches the Earth as a living being, and sees nature as seething with animate presences with which we can commune.

While I sympathize with this view, there are times where immediate, linear intervention is necessary. Consider emergency medicine: If somebody is having a heart attack, you have to get their heart going again right away. You can’t address the lifestyle factors that led to the heart attack — high blood pressure, stress, cholesterol, and so on — until the heart is beating again.