“When The Guardian or the New York Times says things like ‘Your sneakers are destroying the planet,’ it’s absurd,” UCLA English professor Anahid Nersessian said. “It’s meant to produce the kind of internalized sense of despair and degradation so we don’t actually start thinking about the serious questions.”
These “serious questions” are exactly the subject of last Wednesday’s John Ruskin Birthday Lecture, a series hosted by the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values, that intends to reflect on how the humanities can help address the crises of today.
For the fourth annual Ruskin lecture, the director of the creative writing program Roy Scranton chose prominent literary critic Anahid Nersessian. Besides her extensive qualifications — an education from Yale and the University of Chicago, three published books and a Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation — Nersessian’s work aligns closely with the interdisciplinary purpose of the lecture series.
In Nersessian’s case, the crisis is climate change.
“There is no better speaker to address Ruskin than Nersessian,” Scranton said. “Her work is not only engaging and provocative, but she has also done innovative work for the environmental humanities and addressing the dilemma of the Anthropocene.”
Her lecture “Breeze or Soul: Thoughts on Species-Being” addressed how typical reactions to the climate crisis manifest shame and place blame for environmental degradation on human beings through literature. She focused on William Blake’s “Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion” and philosophers Georg Hegel and Karl Marx.
“We are ashamed to belong to a species responsible for so much destruction,” she said. Carbon emissions are at an all-time high. Deforestation is at an all-time high. Weather disasters are at an all-time high. Nersessian suggests that humanity simply can’t cope.
To be motivated by shame, she said, is to ensure we will always fall short when it comes to facing the challenges of climate change.
Instead of individual responsibility, she opts for systemic blame. So your sneakers aren’t to blame for climate change, but rather the system that brings your sneakers to your door. She traced the issue back to the Industrial Revolution which transitioned capitalism and carbon emissions into “hyperdrive.”
She also suggested, in the Marxist tradition, that the capitalist system alienated humanity from one another, that capitalism isolates and that it deflects blame from itself via individualism.
“There is no moment of our existence that is not constrained by the reality that somewhere — maybe your own home, definitely in your town and definitely in thousands of places across the world,” she said. “Somewhere there is someone else whose life is being crushed so someone else can be rich, and maybe that someone is you.”
When we cannot acknowledge others, we cannot acknowledge ourselves, she said. Then, we are unlikely to achieve happiness. We are not living complete lives.
“The lecture was a good recuperation of species-being and gestures towards the possibilities of humanity that are rooted in collective action,” Tobias Boes said. Boes is a faculty fellow for the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and is affiliated with Notre Dame’s Environmental Humanities Initiative. Coincidentally, he also taught Nersessian nearly 20 years ago.
Tianle Zhang, a senior in the Program of Liberal Studies commented, “She covered a massive time span in such a short lecture. I appreciated her philosophical genealogy. Not many people talk about the Greek philosophers and Marx in the same breath.” It was very erudite, he said.
Nersessian calls for a more egalitarian future, a future necessary to mitigate climate change, a world that cannot flourish without acknowledging and holding space for difference.
“I cannot flourish, not truly, without you,” she said. “And you cannot truly flourish without me.”
