1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
|
## Summary
Green rhetoric is not working. The green movement is going backwards in many of
its key demands.
Part of the reason for this, as I explored in chapter 1, is that green rhetors
aren't getting the fundamentals right. By focusing on individual consumption
choices and science denial, they mis-diagnose the root causes of green harms.
Their exhortations, apparently delivered to the universal human collective,
doesn't match up with the interests and powers of their real audiences, namely,
the Western middle classes. As a result, they end up proposing solutions that
aren't feasible.
How could green rhetors be more effective? One common suggestion, explored in
chapter 2, is that green rhetors should avoid the motif of catastrophe, or, in a
certain sense, 'apocalypse.' Catastrophic rhetoric has been accused of creating
resignation, despair, apathy, and dismissal, and of killing genuine politics.
This line of thought, together with the fact that 'apocalypse' is treated as a
catastrophic symbol in popular culture, leads Frances Flannery to suggest that
green rhetors should avoid evoking apocalyptic associations.
However, in chapter 3, I argued that the Apocalypse of St. John, the chief
source of apocalyptic language in the West, had a very different catastrophic
dialectic, and did not create the aforementioned negative reactions, but rather
used apocalyptic language as an essential tool in the author's rhetorical
strategy. In chapter 4, I went further, and argued that in order to succeed now,
green rhetors must use similar apocalyptic rhetorical strategies.
My analysis has severe limits. As I explored in chapter 1, there are many
reasons why green rhetoric is too often failing at present, and there's no good
cause to think that any one solution will fix all. Nor have I made any attempt
to explain why the catastrophic dialectic criticised in chapter 2 are so
consistently reproduced in green rhetoric, nor have I provided a feasible means
of ensuring that green rhetors can and do adopt the apocalyptic strategies I
have proposed. In chapter 1, I warned that a great deal of contemporary green
rhetoric does not successfully identify a practical plan of action or the right
audience to carry it out: I am happy to confess my guilt in the same sin. I have
also not given nearly as much attention to people who hold millenialist
worldviews as I would have liked, and they deserve.
What I do claim, is that, in defiance of the many critics of apocalypticism, and
despite the fact that apocalypticism, like all good things, can and is twisted
to evil ends, green rhetors must draw on John's apocalyptic rhetorical strategies.
Since ancient times, apocalyptic imagination has been used to name and shame
idolatrous economic and ideological systems which pretend to the divine status
of eternal peace and prosperity, while in reality driving massive violence and
destruction which can only end in either revolution or collective suicide. For
all that, the apocalypticist is no cynic: John sees a realistic vision of
social, indeed cosmic, transformation at the end of all things, which has
motivated revolution and resistance for centuries. In the fight for a greener
world, apocalyptic is as necessary as ever.
|
