“For a long time I went to bed early,” is one of the most famous opening lines in world literature. It is very likely that Nikolaj Schultz, a Dane living in Paris, had Marcel Proust in his ears when he began writing his book. On the first page he states: “I have been going to bed late for quite some time, not because I like it that way, but because the heat in this city is unbearable.”
Writing is no help here; it can neither ease the physical pain nor do anything to counteract the rise in temperature. On the contrary, it only makes the climate catastrophe worse: “With every word that is printed on paper with printer’s ink brought from far away, volatile organic compounds enter the atmosphere.” Mea maxima culpa. A good 100 years after the first publication of “In Search of Lost Time”, any hint of melancholy seems, one might understand, inappropriate, even decadent. In the wrong life, as in the wrong literature, it can no longer be about suffering souls, since the sun is now dangerously close to the body.
The climate catastrophe connects the individual with the rest of the world
The sociologist Schultz, born in 1990, calls his book “country sick” but also his condition, which is characterized on the one hand by an excessive sensitivity to the vulnerability of life and on the other by the certainty of one’s own involvement in processes of indebtedness and destruction. Every small consumer decision produces existential costs elsewhere on this planet. The climate catastrophe thus connects the individual with the rest of the world insofar as it participates in its decline.
Schultz’s literary essay attempts to draw the right lessons from both the discovery of this new community and the realization of the responsibility that follows from it. A cool head is needed for this, which is why his alter ego soon leaves the sweltering Paris and flees across the sea to the island of Porquerolles, known for its picturesque landscapes.
While exploring the island, Schultz examines various schools of thought to see if they are still relevant. He considers existentialism, for example, to be passé, since today one can no longer assume that one lives only for oneself, as Jean-Paul Sartre once did (“Hell is other people”). “Instead, it seems as if I exist from others and fed myself like a spider in a web, catching and eating the others.” From here it is not far to the actor-network theory of the sociologist Bruno Latour, one of whose closest collaborators was Schultz. Shortly before Latour’s death two years ago, the two had published a book together: “On the Emergence of an Ecological Class.”
Freedom as a moral problem
But how does class consciousness form in the climate catastrophe? Schultz updates Marx by shifting the focus from the concept of production to that of reproduction. As fertile soil, fresh water and habitable areas disappear, a boundary forms along the lines of the group that has the means of its own reproduction and all the miserable rest.
As one of thousands of day tourists on the island, he soon learns which side he is on. He has barely arrived in the bay of his dreams when a resident asks him to leave so that she can finally be alone. Frightened and ashamed, the young privileged man leaves. His freedom of movement is also at the expense of others. In any case, Schultz sees freedom as more of a moral problem than a political demand. He makes some effort to use the term in a positive way, but he doesn’t quite succeed.
The planetary community he envisions is incompatible with the promise of autonomy in modern times, in which the individual strives for the greatest possible development. It is precisely this focus on the needs of the individual (consumption, mobility, quality of life) that is ultimately responsible for the misery. As the effects of human actions in the so-called Anthropocene become apparent, personal responsibility also grows. The individual, and thus the reader, is understood here simply as someone who is supposed to perceive, consume, think and communicate differently.
You have to change your life, this book tells you, and it is largely silent about the “we”, “you” and “them”. It is astonishing that the sociologist and activist Schultz does not locate the fight for survival at the level of regulation, economic policy or technology. Instead, he places it on the shoulders of the individual. For him, saving the world is not a political task, but at best a philosophical challenge, at worst a private matter.