Of Gods and Monsters: Populist and Pluralist Prospects in the Anthropocene

The concern motivating this article is that the socioecological pressures of the Anthropocene are energizing ethnocentric populist and pluralist democratic political formations, but with different degrees of intensity. Specifically, the article engages several biocultural theories to explain how and why the Anthropocene's cognitive environments may be especially favorable to the authoritarian tendencies of right-wing populism.1 The article's thesis is that understanding the evolutionary roots, cognitive biases, dispositional forms, and environmental drivers of xenophobic hate and ethnocentric intolerance is vital to advancing countervailing pluralist, democratic, and ecologically responsible political and cultural coalitions in the Anthropocene. Ultimately, the article speculates that to curtail the rise of Anthropocene authoritarianism, pluralist pedagogies of cultural difference should be contextualized within a superordinate eco-religious paradigm of trans-cultural species solidarity.Yet, on first thought, it might seem that the Anthropocene is unrelated to questions about right-wing populism and authoritarianism. After all, the Anthropocene signifies a geological condition of pervasive human influences on planetary systems rather than a political environment. But the Anthropocene marks more than a geological condition: its socioecological dynamics create adaptive biocultural pressures to which political actors and cultural constituencies respond in diverse ways. The threats, insecurities, and uncertainties generated by Anthropocene dynamics intensify long-standing forms of human conflict. For example, many scholars and security experts rightly describe climate change as a “threat multiplier.”2 Climate change affects everything from the frequency of severe weather events and zoonotic epidemiology to the politics of immigration and public health. As the CO2-saturated atmosphere traps heat, the ocean absorbs much of the thermal excess. A warming ocean disrupts the currents and oceanic conveyor system that help regulate the climate. Increased ocean temperatures increase the frequency and intensity of severe weather events, affect drought and precipitation cycles on land, and disrupt agricultural systems and food and water supplies, often leading to human displacement and migration. These disruptions impact livelihoods and communities and profoundly destabilize social and economic systems, which, in turn, have political effects by energizing new political movements and alignments.Thus, climate change is one example of how the Anthropocene is simultaneously a geological reality and a time of rapidly changing and increasingly unstable socio-economic, cultural, and political environments. Right-wing populist and autocratic political opportunists in many parts of the world leverage regional manifestations of Anthropocene uncertainties and insecurities to stoke fear, mobilize religious and racial hate, erode democratic institutions, propagate social division, and consolidate power. At the same time, and in response to many of the same conditions, other political and cultural leaders are innovating progressive approaches to human solidarity, environmental responsibility, climate justice, democracy, social and economic equality, and interreligious pluralism. The Anthropocene magnifies contemporary social, political, and biospheric risks by energizing countervailing populist-authoritarian and pluralist-democratic coalitions.For these reasons, the Anthropocene enfolds a dual paradox, conceptual and political. The conceptual paradox is that by making the Earth homo imago, in our human image, we discover ourselves as terra bestiae, creatures of the Earth.3 Besides naming a new human age for the Earth, the Anthropocene renders our biocultural condition more visible: our individual lives, social systems, and civilization can only exist within a habitable space of ecological parameters. The visibility of this ecological precarity creates a conceptual opening that invites social and political theorists to consider how biocultural frameworks can help explain sociopolitical and cultural phenomena. The political paradox is that the Anthropocene's novel sociocultural adaptive pressures differentially energize counteractive ethnocentric populist and pluralist democratic formations. For these reasons, the Anthropocene is a critical context for investigating the global rise of right-wing populism and authoritarianism, as well as the conditions of possibility for countervailing democratic pluralist pedagogies and coalitions.However, the burden of this article is not to make or defend a causal argument about the Anthropocene's political effects. Instead, I treat the Anthropocene as a set of deep, seismic civilizational forces that scholars of social, cultural, and political behavior must contend with. In this vein, I draw from biocultural theories of human behavior to explore how and why specific cognitive and cultural conditions may asymmetrically benefit some ideological formations. The focus of concern is the nexus of conservatism, right-wing populism, and authoritarianism because these political formations are rising globally—see, for example, the national profiles of right-wing, ethnocentric populist parties in Germany, France, Hungary, Brazil, Turkey, India, and the United States, among others. This focus does not mean liberalism, progressivism, and the far-left are immune from critique or, as I will discuss later, that left-wing authoritarianism does not exist. But far-right populism is metastasizing worldwide, gaining political power, and presenting distinctive cultural and political threats to democratic societies.The argument that certain ideological forms may thrive within specific cognitive and cultural environments due to political actors’ underlying psychological predispositions does not entail that the predispositions or the environments are politically determinative. Some humanities scholars and social theorists allege “reductionism” as soon as anyone brings cognition, psychology, and evolutionary theory into a conversation. However, nothing in my argument entails an eliminativist view of human agency and freedom. Instead, biocultural theories, such as those explored in this article, can enrich our understanding of human agency, freedom, political affiliation, moral behavior, and cultural practices by providing supplementary interpretive frameworks. The Anthropocene invites theoretical and interpretive multiplicity rather than reductivism.Before describing the and of the article, I should explain how it into the of this this article of the and of that the and in might that this is the one it is an theoretical of and the other this theoretical is and to by to cultural questions that are simultaneously and This article this of by biocultural to the cultural of hate and intolerance and contemporary in right-wing populism and authoritarianism. 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