Ecological crises are everywhere.
Industrial pollution is killing people and fueling an extinction crisis.
Resource limits are encroaching even as the global population of mass consumers skyrockets.
As a result, ecological and economic shocks shake the world…
Partisan politics, meanwhile, has rarely been more polarized.
One of the country’s most divisive presidents is facing indictments.
The Supreme Court has made a historic ruling on abortion.
The US is locked in a proxy war with Russia while simultaneously contributing to mass murder abroad.
Western democracy itself is in peril…
The year is 1974. Sean Connery is three years out from his nine-year run as James Bond. He is starring in a new film wearing what would prove to be the most audacious costume of his career: red loin-cloth-bandolier, thigh-high cavalier boots, and ponytail-cum-handlebar-mustache.
The film is Zardoz, avant-garde science fiction directed and co-written by John Boorman with the cinematography of Geoffrey Unsworth, better known for his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Richard Donner’s Superman (1978). Boorman is probably most famous for his critically important 1972 film Deliverance. With disappointing critical and box office returns, Zardoz did not match its Oscar-nominated forerunner.
The film is set in 2293 and a technologically sophisticated collective of immortal humans, the Eternals, rule the world. The rest of the human world is populated by the Brutals, destitute subsistence farmers living on the margins of life in a place called the Outlands. Being immortal, the Eternals have no need of new generations and are actively hostile toward procreation. This has led to an asexual, or rather, antisexual society. Horrified by the Brutals’ overproduction, the Eternals unleash a group of Exterminators to keep their population in check. The central character, Zed, played by Connery, is an Exterminator. The Eternals manipulate the Brutals using an idol named Zardoz, a vehicle disguised as a big floating rock shaped like a head who—or whose pilot—claims to be their god. The Eternals, meanwhile, reside in the heavenly Vortex, a realm where no one dies and all decisions are made democratically. Zed stumbles into the Eternals’ utopia and drives them mad with his raw, hairy sex-and-violence magnetism. A complex plot follows, taking many turns before finally culminating in Sean Connery fucking.
(We bemoan the sad state of media literacy today, with social media yakkers making obtuse complaints about stories they clearly misunderstood, but, fifty years ago, after a very confused focus group, the producers of Zardoz felt the need to put in a caveat at the beginning informing audiences that it is satire.)
The film may be a niche classic best known for Connery’s extreme costuming, but it is dense with significance sufficient to warrant literature scholar Anthony Galluzzo writing a seventy-page treatment of the film, a film he considers a “great, good, [and] bad film.” Zardoz keenly satirizes many of the themes and anxieties of its time, like population growth, environmental collapse, counterculture utopianism, and class and political conflict. In Against the Vortex (Zer0 Books, 2023), Galluzzo explores many of the film’s themes, which remain not only relevant today, but in an even more advanced state of decay than they were in 1974.
Galluzzo brings the film into conversation with today’s issues in a compelling read and maintains the ambivalence characteristic of his object of study. Zardoz is not a simplistic black-and-white polemic and nor is Against the Vortex. The second half of the book meanders through academic debates in the general universe of ideas Galluzzo is using the film to engage with, like Malthusianism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. The last chapter is a nesting doll tower of criticism: Galluzzo critiques Fredric Jameson’s contemporaneous critique of Zardoz, itself inspired by Theodor Adorno’s criticism of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (mirroring Galluzzo’s description of the film as “frames within frames within frames.” [This review is just another doll in the nest, just another frame.])
But the first half builds the book’s most original contribution, an answer to all these challenges of 1974 and 2024, a position or tendency or ideology whose name Galluzzo appears to be coining: “Critical Aquarianism.” The closest we get to a definition of this nine-syllable neologism can be sifted out from a tightly-packed paragraph on page 14: Critical Aquarianism is a “strand of the late-Sixties counterculture that defined itself through the rejection of ossified modernist orthodoxies” and an “eclectic program that combined”—let’s bullet point these—
- “individual exploration and communal spirit,”
- “folk traditionalism and avant-garde experimentation”…
- “reason and imagination in the vein of the first-generation Romantics at their most radical”…
- “encompassing neo-Luddism and a revisionist utopianism within limits…”
Stitching together a new -ism out of other -isms and -ations can be difficult to engage with as a concrete political vision. The more tangible political entity most aligned with Critical Aquarianism active at the time of writing is probably the degrowth movement (or Galluzzo’s preferred term: decelerationist ecosocialism). The umbrella term “degrowth” encompasses a range of on-the-ground political and lifestyle movements and a strand of inquiry in academia with transdisciplinary scholarship spanning fields of ecological economics, environmental humanities, geography, and more. Galluzzo’s analysis of Critical Aquarianism is a useful study for tracing some of the lineages of thought now operative in the degrowth world. But the study aspires to more than that, aiming to engage with one of the primary exercises of degrowth discourse in recent years: the utopian imaginary.
As part of that mission of envisioning degrowth utopia, Galluzzo raises important questions, such as, “How to think utopia within limits? And how to distinguish the surplus limits imposed by an artificial and exploitative social arrangement from those necessary biophysical limits attendant upon our creaturely condition?” (p. 50)
And, furthermore,
“How can we collectively live our continuities with non-human natures and Nature, and—insofar as we must also act in our specifically human capacity—repair the damage we’ve wrought on those natures and Nature through striving to repair them? This is the challenge, and the broader ethico-political stakes, for any degrowth or decelerationist ecosocialism.” (p. 53)
Answers to such questions may not fit in one text, and they may be ever-changing. Degrowth and similar programs are, reasonably, averse to the hegemonic idea; degrowth values are intrinsically counter to centralized imposition of one dominating program. However, in order for degrowth to be considered a viable alternative, it needs to provide such answers in some level of detail. Utopian verisimilitude, the appearance of being truthful and plausible, is necessary for any program that seeks influence. And so degrowth thinkers have obliged and begun to provide such answers and details.
One centerpiece of degrowth—and Critical Aquarian—utopian visioning is “conviviality,” from Latin convivere, meaning to live together. There is a useful theoretical history to this term that probably does not deserve to be reduced to the Shire of JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth, but that’s what I’ll do. If you recall the Shire depicted in the early scenes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, with hobbits living together in rural harmony, enjoying food and ale, music, dancing, and fireworks, and a total absence of violence, that’s a pretty nice image of a fully-conceived sort of utopian conviviality (or at least a rural version of it). We can scoff at Tolkien’s fantasies, but, admit it, many, many people, maybe even you, find something comforting, beautiful, deeply appealing—utopian—about the Shire.
Boorman had wanted to adapt Lord of the Rings to the film, but when costs proved prohibitive, he made Zardoz instead, to scratch whatever counterculture fantasy itch he was feeling. The Critical Aquarians overlap with some of the other back-to-the-land, neo-Luddite, Romantic strains of the time, including those that found a utopia in Tolkien’s legends. But Galluzzo, following Boorman, is quick to dismiss Tolkien’s utopia as “traditionalism,” so perhaps for our purpose here, we can instead conceive of a utopian conviviality emerging from some combination of the high-tech, democratic collectivism of the Eternals and the environmentally engaged, farming-and-fucking Brutals. What if the Brutals and Eternals came together and built a compromise between Vortex and Outlands? Whether Tolkien or Boorman, some version of these visions is broadly attractive: the high- and low-tech complementing one another, a society where we spend much of our time in leisure or meaningful work, or at least having agency over how we spend our time, and where the many beauties and joys of the natural world can come back into the human world.
But there is a great and possibly fatal flaw with conviviality—and the whole constellation of related notions in communitarian camps—as a basis for utopian thinking: it often sucks to live with other people. Living together, particularly in any numbers, is a major source of strife and misery. To be fair, this isn’t just a problem with degrowth utopianism, and this protest is not just the grumbling of a crank introvert whose sociality has been eroded by a lifetime of American neoliberal social engineering and the isolation of six years of writing and PhD research during a pandemic and lockdowns (it is that, but there’s more).
Politics itself is often just the trouble of living together: an abstraction of conflicts that come down to petty clashes between people who can’t stand each other’s company. The common problem with the communes—little models of these convivial utopias popular during the Aquarian years and built in the midst of the sorts of societies degrowth aims to reform or abolish—is that, far from inspiring widespread change, they collapsed. And they collapse often due to personality dynamics. Of course, personality clashes aren’t the only cause of political conflict: frictions come out of class and culture and values. These are the big things utopian ideologies (which is all of them) are traditionally concerned with. But politics is not just a means of seizing and then doling out resources and time, or mediating competition between factions. It’s also engaged in managing large groups of individuals who have to share space.
There is little attention paid by either scholars or the public to the intersection of politics and personality psychology. There’s a bit of research on this relationship, which tends to use the “Big Five” or some variation of it to measure personality tendencies and then compare those against respondents’ self-assessed political values. The Big Five traits each fall on a spectrum, including 1) Openness to experience, 2) Conscientiousness, 3) Extroversion, 4) Agreeableness, and 5) Neuroticism. The mix of amounts one possesses of each trait represents a person’s simplified personality profile. One of the findings widely repeated in media has been that “conservatives” score higher on conscientiousness while “liberals” score higher on openness (and the reverse, cons low on openness and libs low on conscientiousness). While there have been several correlative findings, other studies have challenged these, and even questioned the existence of any causal relationship between personality and political affiliation. Some researchers suggest that while there may be correlations, instead of causal relationships, personality traits and political affiliations may have a shared cause earlier in life. Some findings (see below) suggest that political tendencies commonly solidify in a person even before personality traits. One problem with such studies is they rely on a liberal-conservative dichotomy or a Republican-Democrat split for understanding political affiliations, which have limited applications beyond the US and are an oversimplified way of understanding the myriad idiosyncrasies in most peoples’ politics. Part of the problem is also that personality and political beliefs are sometimes difficult to disentangle from one another. Some studies, for instance, have used openness to define liberality, and so found “liberal” people to be more open, creating a tautology rather than a causality or even correlation.
But we don’t need to find causation or even replicable patterns in personality and politics—liberals are this way, conservatives are that way—to know that such personality trait differences drive a lot of political conflict. The 2016 presidential election was a vivid example of this kind of personality conflict being projected onto national figures. Clinton, Trump, and Sanders became avatars for different kinds of personality types: Clinton representing the rule-following, hierarchical, organized, rigid, born-to-boss archetype; Trump representing the impulsive, comic, chaotic, vibe chasing, party guy archetype; and Sanders representing the conscientious, contrarian, independent, egalitarian grandpa archetype. How much was the Stalin-Trotsky feud just about two very different personalities hating each other? Much of political discourse comes down to one camp propping up a caricature of their political opponent with a set of obnoxious personality traits (“creating a guy to get mad at”) to rouse public support for some policy or change. Fox News does it, the X-Twitter Nazisphere does it, liberals do it, and the many shades of leftist do it, too.
Ideological camps have long done the opposite, too: prop up a type of ideal personality for their members to emulate. As late-nineteenth and twentieth-century ideologies moved from the page to the political party and public discourse, they often took on an ideal embodied in a character. Fascism had the macho Übermensch or blond Aryan, physically adept, militaristic, obedient. Industrial communism had the New Soviet Man (and Woman), visually similar to the fascist ideal but more blue-collar and comradelier. American liberalism had the cowboy in the west and the industrialist in the east. Anarchists had (and have) their visually and characteristically vivid rebel subgroups, punks, bikers, black blocs. Liberal technocrats now have the rectangle-frames-wearing, blog-writing, data-fetishizing wonk. The rising right has the armed incel, the buffoon, the fake blue-collar business owner, the tiny-bed pick-up truck driving suburbanite in 1990s Oakleys. The big-state left has the earnest activist or the beleaguered academic or reminisces on old heroes, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che, or Castro. Will the decel-ecosocialist tents adopt the hippie, again? Or is this our moment of Zed?
All these personalities, can they really convivere?
Other ideologies have sought to solve the problem of living together, but only implicitly and not very thoughtfully or peacefully. Fascism blundered on with a faith in the disastrously naïve fantasy that the nation is a homogenous collective where everyone can get along—as long as they get rid of all those who do not fit into their idea of the nation. In the case of Germany, that was a long list: communists, socialists, social democrats, Jews, Roma, non-heterosexuals, disabled people, and more. But, they found, they couldn’t achieve their racial collectivism without war and conquest that could smooth over the nation’s persistent internal frictions. Marxists attempted to achieve a kind of living together, but with class instead of nation as its binding material. The working-class would be the homogenous collective where solidarity in fighting the class war would keep everyone’s personality differences nicely in the background (and when the class war was securely won, sorry but Trotsky would just have to be ice-picked). Liberalism takes the opposite approach, accepting interpersonal conflict as a matter of course. Liberals start from the faith that everyone is a selfish competitor and that this is good and will always yield the best outcome.
No ideologies or utopian imaginaries have solved this problem of living together. In practice, as with everything, people figure out ways to manage on the go. Urban areas address the problem of living together by relying for sociality on either workmates, with whom you don’t have to get too close and who you don’t have to like anyway, or subcultures of like people. Rural and suburban areas have confronted it with copious drug and alcohol use, and some of the other two, work and subculture. Many, many don’t manage it at all: they’re just mostly alone. Most nomadic Millennials compelled by circumstance to live with roommates have had the experience of living and working with people with much lower or higher levels of, say, conscientiousness, and it’s annoying as hell. Today it seems the frequency of having to interact with people who lack good manners, grace, generosity of spirit, or any apparent redeeming qualities has reached extreme levels. So many are annoying to the point that sharing a political movement, much less a home, becomes difficult. How do we live among those who annoy us on a visceral level? This is not a rhetorical question and only barely facetious, but is a real and difficult practical problem that has to be answered if degrowth conviviality—or any desirable alternative—is to be plausible.
Most utopian models—and not just degrowth—draw at least some of their inspiration either deliberately or coincidentally from the kinds of societies that are often called “Indigenous” as shorthand. Whether we’re looking for traits like biocentrism—love and care for ecological systems—or for equality between the sexes and in the distribution of goods, or for a real meritocratic system that rewards positive traits and punishes negatives ones, or for an investment in the unique individuality of each member of a group, or, hey, conviviality, we can find them all in many of the thousands of cultures that have populated the Earth for hundreds of thousands of years. It sometimes feels a little silly to imagine utopias for our great struggle for the future when such societies have existed in plenty for so much of our species’ past (and in diminished numbers in the present).
Against the Vortex brings up such societies as a side note in the Coda:
“While this degrowth or—more accurately—decelerationist ecosocialism should and must draw on the modern revolutionary tradition, from council communism to social ecology, democratic self-governance and socialism, broadly understood, are not only the benevolent legacies of the modern era, like antibiotics. These political forms can also be found in the long, premodern history of human social organization, from paleolithic primitive communism to the admittedly imperfect polis to the Iroquois confederation of communes, among other, older forms of collective life.” (p. 60)
All programs that depend on cultivating a version of the “collective life” of Indigenous utopias, of both the past and present, have to contend with more than the materiality of politics. Degrowth is good on this materiality—the techniques of gathering and distributing food, energy, and the physical shape of habitation—and is better than most or all other programs. But the difficulty of living together, the personality conflicts inherent to it, remains an important gap in this program. Too many still take for granted the naturalness of conviviality and fraternity, of human beings wanting to live together and being able to do so harmoniously. But these are not natural. They must be cultivated, carefully and mindfully, and this is especially so the larger the group becomes. Indigenous forms of conviviality, the kinds found in the sorts of ecological economies and societies that degrowth imaginaries conjure, have had to be built and refined over countless generations. And they had to be protected with violence. In the Lord of the Rings books, the Pax Hobbitus is only possible with the vigilant patrol of Dúnedain rangers keeping the borders of the Shire secure. Meanwhile, in the real world, many of these Indigenous convivial cultures would kill a guy if he got too annoying. Are we ready to do this?
There’s some evidence for the hypothesis that the earliest versions of large human settlements relied on alcohol as a way of supplementing, and then replacing, this hard-won Indigenous conviviality. As increasingly expansionist cities and states eradicated the cultural frameworks of social harmony cultivated by the Indigenous peoples they sought to absorb, annihilate, or displace, and to maintain harmony in large settled groups—people who couldn’t just move away when they fought with their neighbors—they turned to synthetic substitutes for conviviality: fermented drinks that tend to make most people more docile and friendly, codified laws and their formal enforcement, and religions. But these, clearly, are not real solutions.
It’s not only not easy to live together harmoniously, particularly in great numbers, but often not desirable, because basically all of us in the Global North (and many in the Global South), essentially all those not residing in the world’s tragically shrinking smattering of Indigenous enclaves, we are all imperial subjects, and being an imperial subject rarely leaves a person unscathed. We have each—our bodies and personalities—been sluiced out of a precise and remorseless machine, one every bit as invested in shaping us as were hegemonic Spartans in shaping their subjects. Those of us in the anglophone world live in systems with incentive structures that reward many of the worst traits people are capable of: disloyalty, suspiciousness, selfishness, covetousness, wastefulness, niceness of only the most superficial variety, dominance, conformity, callousness to suffering, obedience to authority, and many more. It is a testament to the resilience of human prosociality that most people do not succumb to all of these incentives day-to-day. But even so, the question remains: how do we build convivial societies within these most non-convivial contexts, and with those whose characters have been bent to the will of a malevolent empire?
This is the hard work of political utopian thinking. It’s not just a matter of conjuring up a vague ideal and throwing it into the wind. It’s more like a technician designing a detailed schematic confronting the many uncomfortable challenges that inevitably arise in a group of clever, shaky monkeys with a taste for drama, gossip, and narcotics. Of course, this blueprint is too much for a seventy-page essay about an obscure film, and I would not hold it to that standard. Against the Vortex is a deft look at a brief but interesting period in intellectual history that is relevant to the current moment. And there have been other attempts to think through a convivialist ideology and strategy in greater detail (see below). These may be good starting points for a degrowth utopia, when combined with the rigorous critiques and analyses of that field, but they are far from an endpoint (if there ever is an endpoint).
Degrowth, and the blend of tendencies that shares similar values, is more realistic and beneficial than any other, more than liberals, communists, fascists, or anyone else. Degrowthists are the most rigorous and comprehensive in their analysis of the relationship between human systems, like economies and states, and ecological systems. The challenge going forward will be to plausibly manage and understand even messier relationships: those between mutually annoyed individuals.
Resources for Further Reading:
- Convivialist Manifesto, A declaration of interdependence: https://www.altersocietal.org/documents/English/Manifesto-Eng.pdf (if this link breaks, just search “convivialist manifesto” for many other hosts.)
- THE SECOND CONVIVIALIST MANIFESTO: Towards a Post-Neoliberal World: https://online.ucpress.edu/cs/article/1/1/12721/112920/THE-SECOND-CONVIVIALIST-MANIFESTO-Towards-a-Post
- Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People (Duke University Press, 2021).
- Alcohol and civilization: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/01/social-drinking-moderation-health-risks
- Personality psychology and politics:
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