Elias in the Anthropocene: Human Nature, Evolution and the Politics of the Great Acceleration

Civilization faces the challenge of reconciling growth with biophysical limits, whilst avoiding devastating geo-political conflict. Radical demands for ‘degrowth’ are often juxtaposed with realist ‘eco-modernist’ scenarios. Elias’s theory of civilizing processes and his concept of the triad of controls provide an invaluable framework for evaluating the reality-congruence of both trajectories. An Eliasian understanding of ecological conscience formation is synthesized with insights from Ernest Gellner (on exo-education), Walter Ong (on literacy and individuation) and Owen Barfield (on the history of consciousness). Successful navigation of the politics of the Anthropocene implies societal solutions and arrangements that exist in the barely conceivable ‘adjacent possible.’ Eliasian concepts are invaluable in the exploration of such possibilities, but his rationalism and commitment to greater ‘detachment’ make him blind to the simultaneous requirement for selectively higher degrees of ‘involvement’ in the process of both ecological conscience formation and the consolidation of ‘imagined community’. Adam Seligman’s theory of ritual and sincerity provides a complement to Elias’s rationalism. Elias underplays the possibility that more detached scientific and economistic processes of model making and orientation might co-exist with patterns of conscious, creative, cognitive dissonance: modalities of ‘paradox’, enchantment and participation associated with more relational and reciprocal forms of ‘livelihood’ economy.