Description
Understanding how humans respond to anxiety increasingly has been recognised as important for understanding dynamics in international politics. Such has been the core contribution of the introduction of debates about ontological security into the discipline over the last decade or more. This paper shifts the focus of attention away from the central subjects of analysis of much of this literature, focused as it has been on states and nations, either as sources of ontological (in)security for citizens or as sites through which ontological (in)security dynamics are mediated, to the level of humanity. The paper does two things. First, it outlines how contemporary anxieties are increasingly becoming focused on concerns about the very future, even survival, of the human species, a development that is viewed as somewhat novel. In other words, while anxiety is central to the human condition, historically-speaking people have generally felt secure (i) in the idea that humanity has a planet, a world, a global habitable home that would be there in perpetuity irrespective of our own petty conflicts, and (ii) humanity has also generally felt secure that humans were the pre-eminent intelligent beings, the ultimate subjects and agents. Today, however, climate change is fundamentally challenging the first, while advances in technology (not least artificial intelligence) are challenging the second. It is in the light of such recognition – combined with worries about other threats, such as of global health pandemics and the emergence of antibiotic resistant diseases – that anxieties mediated through the level of the species have arisen. Such anxieties may find expression at the level of the individual, but also increasingly exhibit collectivised and transnational dimensions. For some people they have become a destabilising source of dread and fundamentally debilitating, as evident in the increasing diagnosis by clinicians of ‘eco-anxiety’ amongst their patients, or the debilitating sense of fear, alienation and dread many people experience in the face of the onslaught of new technologies.
Second, the paper maps out some of the different responses that such anxieties have generated. Amongst others, this includes attempts to reassert a sense of control, not least through an embrace of ‘(technological) fetishisation’, as in regard to climate change where the argument is often made that ‘green capitalism’ will save us, or alternatively in discourses of humanity escaping a dying planet through the colonisation of other celestial bodies. In such discourses humanity ultimately wins out, even while for most people this will be a purely vicarious and pyrrhic victory. The extreme alternative is ‘(technological) fatalism’ in which species anxieties are subsumed through an embrace of dystopian futures. In other words, if framed as fatalistic and inevitable, rather than a matter of human choices, then there is less space for anxiety. The paper discusses how both these responses have become core (contending) themes across global popular culture, and where such production operates as both a form of collective therapy, but also a source of anxiety production. The paper then ends by discussing some of the political and moral implications of these developments.
