The Metamorphosis of the World

How Climate Change is Transforming Our Concept of the World

Ulrich Beck

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780745690254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

We live in a world that is increasingly difficult to understand. It is not just changing: it is metamorphosing. Change implies that some things change but other things remain the same capitalism changes, but some aspects of capitalism remain as they always were. Metamorphosis implies a much more radical transformation in which the old certainties of modern society are falling away and something quite new is emerging. To grasp this metamorphosis of the world it is necessary to explore the new beginnings, to focus on what is emerging from the old and seek to grasp future structures and norms in the turmoil of the present. Take climate change: much of the debate about climate change has focused on whether or not it is really happening, and if it is, what we can do to stop or contain it. But this emphasis on solutions blinds us to the fact that climate change is an agent of metamorphosis. It has already altered our way of being in the world the way we live in the world, think about the world and seek to act upon the world through our actions and politics. Rising sea levels are creating new landscapes of inequality drawing new world maps whose key lines are not traditional boundaries between nation-states but elevations above sea level. It is creating an entirely different way of conceptualizing the world and our chances of survival within it. The theory of metamorphosis goes beyond theory of world risk society: it is not about the negative side effects of goods but the positive side effects of bads. They produce normative horizons of common goods and propel us beyond the national frame towards a cosmopolitan outlook.

Part I
Introduction, Evidence, Theory

1
Why Metamorphosis of the World, Why Not Transformation?

This book represents an attempt to rescue myself, and perhaps others too, from a major embarrassment. Even though I have been teaching sociology and studying the transformation of modern societies for many years, I was at a loss for an answer to the simple but necessary question ‘What is the meaning of the global events unfolding before our eyes on the television?’, and I was forced to declare bankruptcy. There was nothing – neither a concept nor a theory – capable of expressing the turmoil of this world in conceptual terms, as required by the German philosopher Hegel.

This turmoil cannot be conceptualized in terms of the notions of ‘change’ available to social science – ‘evolution’, ‘revolution’ and ‘transformation’. For we live in a world that is not just changing, it is metamorphosing. Change implies that some things change but other things remain the same – capitalism changes, but some aspects of capitalism remain as they have always been. Metamorphosis implies a much more radical transformation in which the old certainties of modern society are falling away and something quite new is emerging. To grasp this metamorphosis of the world it is necessary to explore the new beginnings, to focus on what is emerging from the old and seek to grasp future structures and norms in the turmoil of the present.

Take climate change: much of the debate about climate change has focused on whether or not it is really happening and, if it is, what we can do to stop or contain it. But this emphasis on solutions blinds us to the fact that climate change is an agent of metamorphosis. It has already altered our way of being in the world – the way we live in the world, think about the world, and seek to act upon the world through social action and politics. Rising sea levels are creating new landscapes of inequality – drawing new world maps whose key lines are not traditional boundaries between nation-states but elevations above sea level. It creates an entirely different way of conceptualizing the world and our chances of survival within it.

The theory of metamorphosis goes beyond theory of world risk society: it is not about the negative side effects of goods but about the positive side effects of bads. They produce normative horizons of common goods and propel us beyond the national frame towards a cosmopolitan outlook.

But the word ‘metamorphosis’ must still be handled gingerly and placed within quotation marks. It still bears all the hallmarks of a foreign body. Certainly, for the time being this word will probably have to be content with guest worker status, and it remains open whether it will ever become part of our common sense. At any rate, with this book I propose to adopt the migratory concept ‘metamorphosis’ into the social common sense of countries and languages. This is simply an attempt to offer a plausible answer to the urgent question ‘What world are we actually living in?’ My answer is: in the metamorphosis of the world. However, this is an answer that requires willingness on the part of the reader to risk the metamorphosis of their worldview.

And of course there is a second overwhelming term in the title: ‘world’, which is closely linked to the term ‘humanity’. What is this about?

The talk of the failure of the world focuses attention on the concept ‘world’. All institutions are failing; no one and nothing is decisive enough in confronting global climate risk. And it is precisely this insistence on failure that is making the world the point of reference for a better world.

In this way, the concept ‘world’ has become familiar. It has become indispensable for describing the most mundane things. It has lost its aloof isolation, its Himalaya-like grandeur, and through the back door it has crept into and ensconced itself in our everyday, most private language. Nowadays, pineapples, no less than the nursing staff for the elderly, have a global background (and everyone knows this). Someone who asks where the pineapples come from receives the welcome information that they are ‘flown-in pineapples’. Correspondingly, there are ‘flown-in mothers’, who want to (or have to) care and provide for other people's children here and their own children back home in accordance with the rules of ‘long-distance love’. Even cursory reflection shows that the concepts ‘world’ and ‘one's own life’ are no longer strangers. They are now and henceforth bound together in ‘cohabitation’ – in ‘cohabitation’ because there is no official authenticating document (whether of science or the state) for this lifelong global union.

Having said all this, the question remains: Why meta­morphosis of the world, why not ‘social change’ or ‘transformation’?

Taking the Chinese case, transformation means what China has experienced since the Cultural Revolution and the Chinese economic reform: an evolutionary path from closed to open, from national to global, from poor to rich, from isolated to more involved. Metamorphosis of the world means more than, and something different from, an evolutionary path from closed to open; it means epochal change of worldviews, the refiguration of the national worldview. Yet, it is not a change of worldviews that is caused by war, violence or imperial aggression but one that is caused by the side effects of successful modernization, such as digitalization or the anticipation of climate catastrophe to humankind. The institutionalized national-international Weltbild, the world picture, the significance in how humans today apprehend the world, has withered. ‘World picture’ means that for every cosmos there is a corresponding nomos, combining normative and empirical certainties as to what the world, its past and its future, is all about. These ‘fixed stars’, fixed certainties, are not fixed any more. They are metamorphosed in a sense that can be understood as the ‘Copernican Turn 2.0’.

Galileo discovered the fact that the sun is not circulating around the earth, but that the earth travels around the sun. Today we are in a different but somewhat similar situation. Climate risk teaches us that the nation is not the centre of the world. The world is not circulating around the nation, but the nations are circulating around the new fixed stars: ‘world’ and ‘humanity’. The internet is an example of this. First, it creates the world as the unit of communication. And, second, it creates humanity by simply offering the potential of literally interconnecting everybody. It is in this space that national and other borders are renegotiated, disappear, and then built up anew – i.e., are ‘metamorphosed’.

Consequently, ‘methodological nationalism’ is the lesson of the sun turning around the world or, to put it differently, the lesson of the turning of the world around the nation. ‘Methodological cosmopolitanism’, on the contrary, is the lesson of the earth turning around the sun or, better, the lesson of the nations turning around the ‘world at risk’. From a national outlook the nation is the axis, the fixed star, around which the world turns. From a cosmopolitan outlook this nation-centric world picture appears historically false. The metamorphosis of the world means that the ‘metaphysics’ of the world is changing.^*

To understand why the world picture is ‘historically false’ we need to distinguish between the Copernican Turn in the natural scientific and in the social scientific 2.0 sense. The world picture which claimed that the sun is turning around the earth has always been false. It is only that this reality has been denied by those following and defending the religious dogma. The Copernican Turn 2.0 unfolds in reality – that is, in everyday activity – in the actual upheaval and downfall of the world order. This does not mean, however, that nations and nation-states dissolve and disappear but that nations are ‘metamorphosed’. They need to find their place in the digital world at risk, in which borders have become liquid and flexible; they need to (re)invent themselves, turning around the new fixed stars of ‘world’ and ‘humanity’.

In a similar manner to how the modern international world order, the sovereign state, industrialization, capital, classes, nations and democracy set in and unfolded after the collapse of the religious world order, global climate risk contains a sort of navigation system for the threatened world (see later). Climate risk denotes the path. But this does not mean that it will be a successful path. It is possible that humanity may choose a path at the end of which lies its self-destruction. This possibility exists not least because, when this path comes into plain view, it becomes clear that the ‘eternal certainties’ of the national worldview are short-sighted and wrong and lose their self-evidence as the beliefs of a whole epoch.

The history of metamorphosis is a history of ideological conflicts (wars of religion) – in the past regionally, today globally. We are experiencing a struggle between competing images of the world involving fierce, brutal conflicts, bloody conquests, dirty wars, terror and counter-terror – for example, Christians against barbaric heathens. Charlemagne built his Christian empire in the secure knowledge that it was permissible to kill for the holy faith, to wipe out the unbaptized and their culture. In an alliance with the pope, he imposed God's commandments with brute force. This Christian-religious worldview was based on the unity of conquest and mission, on the alliance between the sword and the cross. Christian baptism was realized with violence in the act of subjugation. This religious worldview taught that peace is possible only as peace within the unity of Christendom.

In a historical variation on Galileo's discovery, the world no longer revolves around the minor princedoms, around the conflict between Catholics and Huguenots, between colonial masters and barbarians, between superhumans and subhumans. The race-centric view of the world is defunct (especially in Germany and in Europe as a response to the racial fanaticism of the Nazis) – the patriarchal world picture, too (though not in all parts of the world), and the world picture which proclaims equality but excludes women, slaves and ‘barbarians’. Just take the founding fathers of the United States of America and its constitution, who did not even notice that African Americans were excluded from human rights – they took it as the most natural thing on earth.

And, again, what does ‘withered’ mean? Many, most likely even all of these world pictures still exist today simultaneously and alongside each other. ‘Withered’ means two things: first, the world pictures have lost their certainty, their dominance. Second, nobody can escape the global. This is because, as we will see in the chapters to follow, the global – i.e., the cosmopolitized reality – is not just ‘out there’ but constitutes everybody's strategic lived reality.

In order to grasp this, it is necessary to distinguish between Glaubenssätze, ‘doctrines’, and Handlungsräume, ‘spaces of action’, which are the existential parameters of social activity when it comes to world pictures. Doctrines can be particular or minority-oriented e.g., anti-cosmopolitan, anti-European, religiously fundamental, ethnic, racist; spaces of action, on the contrary, are inevitably constituted in a cosmopolitan way. The anti-Europeans actually sit in the European parliament (otherwise they don't matter at all). The religious anti-modernist fundamentalists celebrate the beheading of their Western hostages on digital channels and digital media platforms in order to shock the world with their inhuman terror regime. If tomorrow a group appears that propagates the political superiority of left-handed redheads, they will announce and practise their belief not just locally but globally.

Even immobile people are cosmopolitized. People who have never left their villages, let alone ever boarded a plane, are still closely and commonly linked with the world: in one way or other they are affected by global risks. And they are linked with the world not least because the mobile phone has come to be an integral part of the everyday across the globe. The metamorphosis in this, however, is not simply that everybody is (potentially) interlinked but that this entering into the ‘world’ means to enter something that follows a completely different logic. They end up in a world that is fundamentally different from what they think and expect – i.e., a world in which, as mobile phone users, they are metamorphosed into (data) resources and transparent and controllable consumers for global transnational corporations. This is a key feature of metamorphosis.

No matter if you want to save money by avoiding taxes or if you are infertile but long for a child, to reach your goal you need to understand and make use of the legal and economic differences that exist between various economic and legal realms in different national contexts. A developer who thinks strictly nationally – i.e., rigorously dismisses cheap foreign labour in favour of more expensive German building workers – will go bankrupt. To put it differently: those who take the national imperative as the imperative for their action – i.e., who stop at national borders – are the losers in the cosmopolitized world.

Of course, everybody is free to choose not t...