Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. The financial and economic crisis has demonstrated the fragility of the free market system that its defenders believed had triumphed in the cold war; but there is no sign of anything resembling the socialist project that in the past was seen by many as embodying capitalism’s successor. Žižek’s work, which reflects this paradoxical situation in a number of ways, has made him one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals.

Born and educated in Ljubljana, the capital of the People’s Republic of Slovenia in the former Yugoslav federation until the federal state began to break up and Slovenia declared independence in 1990, Žižek has held academic positions in Britain, America, and Western Europe as well as in Slovenia. His prodigious output (over sixty volumes since his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, was published in 1989), innumerable articles and interviews, together with films such as Žižek! (2005) and The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), have given him a presence that extends far beyond the academy. Well attuned to popular culture, particularly film, he has a following among young people in many countries, including those of post-Communist Europe. He has a journal dedicated to his work—International Journal of Žižek Studies, founded in 2007—whose readership is registered via Facebook, and in October 2011 he addressed members of the Occupy movement in Zuccotti Park in New York, an event that was widely reported and can be viewed on YouTube.

Žižek’s wide influence does not mean that his philosophical and political standpoint can be easily defined. A member of the Communist Party of Slovenia until he resigned in 1988, Žižek had difficult relations with the Party authorities for many years owing to his interest in what they viewed as heterodox ideas. In 1990 he stood as a presidential candidate for Liberal Democracy of Slovenia, a party of the center left that was the dominant political force in the country for the rest of the decade; but liberal ideas, aside from serving as a reference point for positions he rejects, have never shaped his thinking.

Žižek was dismissed from his first university teaching post in the early 1970s, when the Slovenian authorities judged a thesis he had written on French structuralism—then an influential movement in anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy claiming that human thought and behavior exemplify a universal system of interrelated principles—to be “non-Marxist.” The episode demonstrated the limited nature of the intellectual liberalization that was being promoted in the country at the time, but Žižek’s later work suggests that the authorities were right in judging that his intellectual orientation was not Marxian. Throughout the enormous corpus of work he has since built up, Marx is criticized for being insufficiently radical in his rejection of existing modes of thought, while Hegel—a much greater influence on Žižek—is praised for being willing to lay aside classical logic in order to develop a more dialectical way of thinking. But Hegel is also criticized for having too great an attachment to traditional modes of reasoning, and a central theme of Žižek’s writings is the need to shed the commitment to intellectual objectivity that has guided radical thinkers in the past.

Žižek’s work sets itself in opposition to Marx on many issues. For all he owed to Hegelian metaphysics, Marx was also an empirical thinker who tried to frame theories about the actual course of historical development. It was not the abstract idea of revolution with which he was primarily concerned, but a revolutionary project involving specific and radical alterations in economic institutions and power relations.

Žižek shows little interest in these aspects of Marx’s thinking. Aiming “to repeat the Marxist ‘critique of political economy’ without the utopian-ideological notion of communism as its inherent standard,” he believes that “the twentieth-century communist project was utopian precisely insofar as it was not radical enough.” As Žižek sees it, Marx’s understanding of communism was partly responsible for this failure: “Marx’s notion of the communist society is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy; that is, a fantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonisms he so aptly described.”

While he rejects Marx’s conception of communism, Žižek devotes none of the over one thousand pages of Less Than Nothing to specifying the economic system or institutions of government that would feature in a communist society of the kind he favors. In effect a compendium of Žižek’s work to date, Less Than Nothing is devoted instead to reinterpreting Marx by way of Hegel—one of the book’s sections is called “Marx as a Reader of Hegel, Hegel as a Reader of Marx”—and reformulating Hegelian philosophy by reference to the thought of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

A “post-structuralist” who rejected the belief that reality can be captured in language, Lacan also rejected the standard interpretation of Hegel’s idea of “the cunning of reason,” according to which world history is the realization by oblique and indirect means of reason in human life. For Lacan as Žižek summarizes him, “The Cunning of Reason…in no way involves a faith in a secret guiding hand guaranteeing that all the apparent contingency of unreason will somehow contribute to the harmony of the Totality of Reason: if anything, it involves a trust in un-Reason.” On this Lacanian reading, the message of Hegel’s philosophy is not the progressive unfolding of rationality in history but instead the impotence of reason.

The Hegel that emerges in Žižek’s writings thus bears little resemblance to the idealist philosopher who features in standard histories of thought. Hegel is commonly associated with the idea that history has an inherent logic in which ideas are embodied in practice and then left behind in a dialectical process in which they are transcended by their opposites. Drawing on the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou, Žižek radicalizes this idea of dialectic to mean the rejection of the logical principle of noncontradiction, so that rather than seeing rationality at work in history, Hegel rejects reason itself as it has been understood in the past. Implicit in Hegel (according to Žižek) is a new kind of “paraconsistent logic” in which a proposition “is not really suppressed by its negation.” This new logic, Žižek suggests, is well suited to understanding capitalism today. “Is not ‘postmodern’ capitalism an increasingly paraconsistent system,” he asks rhetorically, “in which, in a variety of modes, P is non-P: the order is its own transgression, capitalism can thrive under communist rule, and so on?”

Living in the End Times is presented by Žižek as being concerned with this situation. Summarizing the book’s central theme, he writes:

The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its “four riders of the apocalypse” are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.

With its sweeping claims and magniloquent rhetoric, this passage is typical of much in Žižek’s work. What he describes as the premise of the book is simple only because it passes over historical facts. Reading it, no one would suspect that, putting aside the killings of many millions for ideological reasons, some of the last century’s worst ecological disasters—the destruction of nature in the former Soviet Union and the devastation of the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, for example—occurred in centrally planned economies. Ecological devastation is not a result only of the economic system that exists in much of the world at the present time; while it may be true that the prevailing version of capitalism is unsustainable in environmental terms, there is nothing in the history of the past century that suggests the environment will be better protected if a socialist system is installed.

But to criticize Žižek for neglecting these facts is to misunderstand his intent, for unlike Marx he does not aim to ground his theorizing in a reading of history that is based in facts. “Today’s historical juncture does not compel us to drop the notion of the proletariat, or of the proletarian position—on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level beyond even Marx’s imagination,” he writes. “We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject [i.e., the thinking and acting human being], a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of its substantial content.” In Žižek’s hands, Marxian ideas—which in Marx’s materialist view were meant to designate objective social facts—become subjective expressions of revolutionary commitment. Whether such ideas correspond to anything in the world is irrelevant…..

 

Read the rest of his article at: From: The NY Review of Books /July 12, 2012

 

 

“It’s crucial to see violence which is done repeatedly to keep the things the way they are. In that sense, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.” See Shobhan Saxena’s interview with Žižek, “ First they called me a joker, now I am a dangerous thinker ,” The Times of India , January 10, 2010. ↩

Andrew Feenberg, Alternative Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. pp. xi and 251

ISBN 0-520-08986-3

In Alternative Modernity, Andrew Feenberg continues his efforts to produce a critical theory of technology which develops philosophical perspectives to help us understand the immense importance and impact of technology within the contemporary world. His studies undertake to explore the impact of technology on diverse regions of human life and culture, and to interrogate both major theories concerning technology and some other cultural responses to the development of Western technology, including science fiction, dystopic film, and Japanese culture. In particular, Feenberg uses a reconstructed version of the Frankfurt school critique of technology, building on his own earlier Critical Theory of Technology (1991). But he also draws on French postmodern theory, as well as Japanese theory and various cultural texts, to analyze Western modernity and to explore multicultural alternative modernities. His goal is to counter dystopic and technophobic visions of modernity, while showing some positive uses of technology to advance human emancipation and some alternative attitudes to and conceptions of technology and Western modernity.

Feenberg’s major focus and distinctive position within current debates on technology is emphasis on democratic potential for the social reconstruction of technology. Feenberg rejects both neutralist positions which see technology as a mere instrument of human practice, amenable to any and all projects and uses, and determinist notions which see it as a instrument of domination in the hands of ruling elites whose very construction determines the uses, limits, and applications of technology. Instead he sees technology as a contested field where individuals and social groups can struggle to influence and change technological design such that the very construction of technology is subject to democratic debate and contestation.

Thus, Feenberg develops a dialectical approach to technology that perceives both negative and positive uses and effects, seeing technology as an always contested field that can be reconstructed to serve human needs and goals. Consequently, he develops a position that neither falls into a naive technological optimism, or prey to rigid technological determinism and technophobic attacks on technology. He also succeeds in combining the articulation of theoretical and cultural perspectives on technology with concrete studies of the use of medical technologies to fight AIDS, French Minitel and Videotext systems, and Japanese critiques of technology and conceptions of alternative approaches to modernity.

Feenberg, the Frankfurt School and Postmodern Theory

Feenberg makes the interesting point that dystopic forms of media culture promoted a critical space to view technology with suspicion in the aftermath of World War Two and the unleashing of the atomic bomb in Japan at the end of the war (41ff.). Popular film, music, and discourses reflected public distrust and fear of big technology that was producing immense weapon systems, new forms of nuclear energy, and a technological society that was changing the very face of the social world while also, we were to learn later, threatening the integrity of the natural environment and even survival of the human species.

This climate helped generate a serious and positive reception of critiques of technology by theorists such as Heidegger, Weber, and the Frankfurt School which went against the celebrations of technology in the dominant ideology of the day. Feenberg himself roots his theoretical perspectives on technology in the work of the Frankfurt School and pays homage to his teacher Herbert Marcuse in the opening chapter of his book. Marcuse took up the challenge of providing a critical theory of society in an age of affluence, arguing that technology, supposedly the source of wealth and affluence, was also a source of social domination and cultural poverty that was not meeting basic human needs for peace, freedom, individuality, and happiness (19ff). Yet technology for Marcuse provides the potential to provide a better life for all if it in reconstructed, made accessible to the public, and aimed at the fulfillment of human needs, and not such systemic imperatives as domination, profit, and perpetuating the status quo.

Yet Feenberg believes that Marcuse did not go far enough in linking the reconstruction of technology to social reconstruction and operated on too abstract a philosophical plane that needs concretion and further development and he takes this challenge as his own project. Feuerbach appreciates that Marcuse makes technology a political issue, subject to debate and contestation, and that it is a key constituent of the contemporary world, thus linking social theory and critique with theorizing and reconstructing technology. Feenberg, however, wants to develop what he calls ‘interactive strategies of change’ which involve the interaction between state and corporate interests, scientists and technical designers and engineering, and the public in a complex process of negotiation and contestation over the construction and design of technologies (34ff). He argues that conceiving of technology in this way opens it up as a field of negotiation, debate, and struggle over its design, effects, and ends that help democratize technology.

Rejecting dystopic positions that would simply reject and negate technology tout court, Feenberg argues that it is more productive to focus on the reconstruction of technology rather than its vilification. He claims that post-1960s struggles have put in question absolute faith in science and technology, and the individuals and institutions which develop and implement it. With a public questioning technology, demanding changes, and in some cases carrying them out, technology is thus more flexible, transformable, and amendable to democratic debate and reconstruction than previous theories had indicated. As examples — which will be fleshed out in separate studies later in the book –, Feenberg suggests the ways that French consumers transformed the Minitel Videotext system from an information data base to an interactive system of communication articulating popular desires and needs; the ways AIDS patients and women undergoing childbirth insisted on alteration of pre-existing medical systems; and on the ways that the Japanese appropriated Western technology to mesh with their own traditions and cultural and social system. In all of these cases, technology is seen as subject to contestation, reconstruction, and democratic participation which directs it to serve human and social needs and not just hegemonic societal interests.

The subtitle of Feenberg’s book is ‘The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory’ and he best fleshes out this dimension of his project in a chapter that engages the ‘technocracy thesis’ (75ff) and throughout the book will attempt to reconstruct the Frankfurt School and blend its perspectives with other theoretical traditions such as French postmodern theory and Japanese multicultural theory. Given Rorty’s successful marketing of the notion of the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, the notion of the ‘technical turn’ may, however, be misleading as it suggests an increasing tendency toward more technical philosophy — a trend certainly evident today, but not one that Feenberg would endorse. Instead, he means a turn to see the fundamental importance of technology, technique, and the technical in the contemporary society and the need to develop critical and social interactionist perspectives toward this ‘technical turn,’ drawing on the most advanced theory and philosophy.

Feenberg develops his perspectives on the technical turn by criticizing the classical positions of the Frankfurt School on technology as domination (in particular Adorno and Horkheimer and Marcuse), considering Habermas’s critique of the earlier Frankfurt School positions and development of his own theories, and then engaging Axel Honneth’s critique of Habermas and further development of the Frankfurt School, followed by Feenberg’s moving beyond Honneth toward his own perspectives. The classical perspectives of the Frankfurt School toward technology, Feenberg believes, are too pessimistic and totalizing, seeing technology largely as an instrument of domination. Habermas in turn adopts a more instrumentalist view of technology, seeing it as an instrument of technologically rational action that serves instrumental ends. Yet Habermas also sees technological rationality colonizing the life-world, invading areas where communication and social interaction should prevail, and thus ultimately for Habermas, in Feenberg’s reading, the pessimistic Frankfurt School perspectives on technological domination continue to prevail (76f).

Yet Habermas wants to counter the hegemonic modes of technological rationality and instrumental reason with a notion of communicative rationality oriented toward an ‘ideal speech situation’ in which norms of rational debate and consensus would govern concerns about technology as well as other issues of public importance (78f). Feenberg believes that this is a step in the right direction, but takes up Axel Honneth’s critique that Habermas’s conception of consensus and the ideal speech situation is too much of an ideal-type social myth that does not adequately take into account the issue of power and constraints on rational consensus in the contemporary world. Honneth in turn proposes that ‘social struggle’ is the form of action taken in contests over social norms, institutions, and power, and thus develops syntheses of Habermas and Foucault that would combine analysis of power, resistance, and rational debate in adjudicating social and political issues and conflicts.

Feenberg is also sympathetic to Honneth’s critique of Habermas’s notion of ‘system,’ which following Parsons, Luhmann, and systems theory presents social systems as reified and depersonalized (81). Feenberg, by contrast, wants to operate with a richer notion of the social and of organization which sees institutions as complex conglomerates of rules and regulations, bureaucratic procedures and interests, technical imperatives, and norms and practices, all subject to contestation, debate, and reconstruction. While Feenberg is sympathetic to Bruno Latour and social constructionists who see technology and institutions as constructions imposed upon the public which dictate thought and behavior (84), and himself introduces a notion of ‘implementation bias’ that dictates how technology is constructed and used, he wants to make these biases and constructions subject to debate, struggle, and reconstruction, thus opening up society and technology to social transformation.

Indeed, one of the most valuable elements of Feenberg’s work is precisely the way he links social transformation with technical transformation, theorizing both society and technology as contested fields open to social contestation and change. He also makes clear that there can be no meaningful talk of social reconstruction unless there is consideration of changing technology, of transforming its design, uses, and practices, thus linking social change with the reconstruction of technology. Feenberg is keenly aware of the central role of technology in contemporary society and that to understand and change society requires understanding and transforming technology.

Appropriating/Expropriating/Reconstructing Technology

While I am highly sympathetic to Feenberg’s project and find his writings extremely useful for philosophy and social theory today, I worry that he underestimates the power of technology as a force of domination and veers too far toward an overly optimistic stance. While he rightly criticizes the classical Frankfurt School for being too pessimistic and frequently totalizing in their assault on technology and seeing it largely as a force of domination, he perhaps downplays the extent to which technology does serve as instruments of domination by societal elites. My own view is that in today’s world we should see technology as both a force of emancipation and domination, holding onto the most negative critiques that we play off against the most utopian possibilities. From this perspective, it appears that Feenberg plays down too much the negative aspects of technology and is too optimistic concerning positive uses and the possibility of reconstruction.

Feenberg counters pessimistic and dystopic perspectives that technology cannot be changed, that it is the fate of the modern world to live in an ‘iron cage’ of technological domination (Heidegger and Max Weber), with some cases studies that indicate that technology can be reconstructed to fulfill human needs and is subject to democratic debate and transformation. As examples, Feenberg indicates how AIDS patients struggled for experimental drugs, the change of government and medical AIDS policies, and (96ff) successfully challenged and transformed medical and government policy and practice. This case also provides for Feenberg examples of how the functional imperatives of medicine treat patients as mere objects, suppressing the “caring” treatment of medicine with emphasis on “curing.” AIDS patients, however, forced the medical system to address their concerns and to modify their practices accordingly.

Feenberg also devotes two chapters to the French Minitel/Videotext experiment to show how individuals have creatively appropriate existing technological systems for their own purposes and in fact restructured technology (123-66) and technical systems. The French telephone system initially provided a Minitel telephone/computer apparatus to each customer free of charge that would allow individuals to tap into data bases to get weather and railway information, news bulletins, and other forms of information. It was intended to help enable the French to interact in a high tech exchange value and thus to aid the process of French modernization.

In practice, however, individuals hacked into bulletin boards which were reconfigured to allow message posting, and eventually split-screen on-line communication and chatlines that enabled diverse forms of social interaction and connection. This expropriation shows how individuals could reconfigure technology to serve their own purposes which may have been at odds with the purposes of those who designed the technology, as when the French used Minitel to engage in interpersonal discussion, to facilitate sexual adventures, or to promote political projects, rather than just to consume officially-provided information.

Both the AIDS and the Minitel examples show how technological systems that were devised by elites according to technical and functional requirements could be resisted by groups involved in the systems and reconfigured to better serve their own needs. Both appropriation of technical knowledge and tools for purposes opposed to their original design and implementation, and the expropriation and reconstruction of technologies and technical practices to serve countergoals and values, show that technology is more complex, flexible, and subject to contestation and reconstruction than in many existing theories and critiques of technology. It suggests the need for more multilayered theories of how technologies are introduced, implemented, and developed, and subject to subversion and reconstruction.

Moreover, as Feenberg argues in conclusion, restructuring technology and promoting technological creativity can serve as a figure for the reconstruction of society and one’s way of life:

Technological creativity is a form of imaginative play with alternative worlds and ways of being. A multicultural politics of technology is possible; it would pursue elegant designs that reconcile several worlds in each device and system. To the extent that this strategy is successful, it prepares a very different future from the one projected by social theory up to now. In that future, technology is not a particular value one must choose for or against, but a challenge to evolve and multiply worlds without end (232).

Some Critical Concerns

In the final chapters, Feenberg delineates some Japanese perspectives on ‘alternative modernity’ based on a reading of the philosopher Nishida and reflections on the game of Go, which embodies values different than the Western ones of success and competition. Feenberg’s point is that alternative social constructions of modernity are possible that construct different sorts and uses of technology, subjected to differing cultural traditions and aesthetic sensibilities. Thus, Nishida envisaged a Japanese modernity which combined Western modernity with Japanese cultural traditions, so that technology would be embedded in cultural and everyday practices and subject to Japanese values and aesthetics. Such a synthesis of art and technology concretizes the call for a merger of these domains by Marcuse in his conception of a new technology. For Feenberg, such conceptions relativize the Western concepts of technology, modernity, and rationality, and show that other alternatives conceptions are available. These perspectives point to a diversity of types of technology and social organization, thus breaking with the unitary and universalizing model of Western modernity and modernization theory.

In a co-edited book from the same period of Alternative modernity, Feenberg sketches out a conception of ‘subversive rationalization’ which points to technological design and advances opposed to hegemonic forms of technology in contemporary Western societies. While Feenberg’s valorization of alternative expropriations and reconstructions of technology, of opening technologies and technical systems to debate and contestation, and to theorizing how technology can be used to serve human needs and enhance human life rather than the interests of dominant social powers is of immense importance, I have some concluding concerns. Although it is no doubt possible to challenge systems of technological domination, to reconstruct technologies, and to guide how technology will be constructed and implemented, it is also the case that technological organization of the workplace and the capitalist corporation, the state and its bureaucracies, the medical establishment, as well as the University and other institutions, are structured to a large extent by systems of technological rationality that are extremely difficult to transform and reconstruct, and even to contest.

Feenberg is certainly right that we should overcome simplistic and one-sided views of technology as either inherently an instrument of progress or of domination, but he underplays the ways that technology is currently used as an instrument of domination and how difficult it is to resist, restructure, and use for social reconstruction. From this perspective, the more pessimistic arguments of the Frankfurt School make clear the immensity of the challenge of social transformation and the power of the dominant societal forces that create technology in their own interests. Although Feenberg emphasizes how capitalist imperatives and biases enter into the design, construction, and implementation of technology, he downplays the extent to which capital, the state, and dominant institutions themselves construct technologies in their own interests and resist alternative technologies and reconstruction.

Yet Feenberg’s more activist and optimistic perspectives are more productive and useful than gloomier prognoses that only see technology as an instrument of domination. It is both useful and correct to see the social constructedness of technology and modernity and the importance of devising alternatives. Social transformation clearly requires reconstruction of technology and it is Feenberg’s merit to demonstrate both that technology is a product of social design and construction and that transforming society to make it more democratic and responsive to human needs requires reconstructing technology.

Douglas Kellner,

University of Texas/University of California at Los Angeles

Home Minister intervenes Heehs prevails

Akash Kapur

buy this book

This post is adapted from Akash Kapur’s India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (Riverhead Books).

From The Atlantic

India Is Burning: How Rapid Growth Is Destroying Its Environment and Future

When I first moved back to India, in the winter of 2003, after more than a decade in America, I never thought I would live in the countryside. My wife and I had been living in New York; we liked the energy, the nightlife and variety, of a big city.

We quickly discovered, though, that Indian cities were unlivable–crowded and noisy and polluted, they were no place to raise a family. So we decided to stay, with our two boys, in the countryside outside the South Indian town of Pondicherry, the area where I had grown up.

We liked our new life. The countryside had its rhythms; it made us feel safe, far from the chaos of urban India.

Summers were dry and quiet, with a hot wind that emptied roads and public spaces. Winters were wet and then cool, monsoon downpours followed by a clear, clean light.

The familiarity, the predictability, were comforting. Everything else in India was moving so fast; in the countryside, seasons at least stayed constant.

Then one April the summer wind brought with it an unfamiliar guest: the smell of burning plastic. It started on a Sunday afternoon, a hint of bitterness, like something rotten in the air. I barely noticed. A couple days later my wife woke me in the middle of the night and said something was burning. This time the bitterness was unmistakable, a chemical taste in my mouth, a trail of roughness along my constricted throat.

My older son woke up, vomiting. We nursed him through the night. We told ourselves it was a stomach bug, something he’d eaten. But he’d eaten what we had all eaten, and as we stayed up with him, wiped his vomit and rubbed his stomach, comforted him, promised him it was nothing, it would pass, we couldn’t shake the terrible feeling that it was in fact something very real–that he’d been poisoned by the air.

•       •       •       •       •The smell invaded our house throughout the following weeks and months. It came from a landfill south of my home, Pondicherry’s main garbage dump. Every day, almost 400 tons of garbage–plastic bags and shoes and rubber tires and batteries mixed with rotting fruit and meat–were carried there by tractors, and thrown in putrefying piles that emanated combustible methane gas.

The landfill was far from my house. It was almost two miles away. It had been there for over a decade, but I had never noticed it. Now, with Pondicherry growing, its residents getting richer, buying more, discarding more, the dump had swollen.

Over the years, hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage had built up. The dump was running out of space. The fires, some man-made, some the result of spontaneous combustion, were getting bigger. The smoke was getting thicker, and traveling farther.

To me and my wife, the situation was bewildering. For so long, we had told ourselves that we were happy with the bargain we had made by choosing to live in rural India. We had decided to raise our children in a place where the water was drinkable, and the skies clear at night. Now the world was crowding in. I was told that the dump was emitting furans and dioxins and other toxic chemicals. I was told that these poisons could lead to cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory disease. And I was told, too, that children, with their undeveloped immune systems, were most susceptible.

What were responsible parents to do? We talked a lot about moving. “But to where?” my wife would ask. The landfills were everywhere, smoking heaps outside (and sometimes inside) cities, along highways, in fields and forests.

India produced some 100 million tons of municipal waste every year. According to the OECD, only 60% of this waste was even collected. A far smaller (almost nonexistent) amount was recycled. The garbage just piled up–and rotted, and smoldered, and polluted the air and water.

Sometimes, when I drove along highways lined with blazing garbage, when I passed through remote villages shrouded in smoke, it seemed like there wasn’t a safe corner in the country. India, I began to feel, was burning.

•       •       •       •       •India was burning–and, in a similar way, it was eroding, melting, drying, silting up, suffocating. Across the country, rivers and lakes and glaciers were disappearing, underground aquifers being depleted, air quality declining, beaches being swept away.

The numbers were astounding. According to a government report I read, almost half of India’s land suffered from some kind of erosion. Seventy percent of its surface water was polluted. Earlier this year, a study conducted by Yale and Columbia universities concluded that India had the worst air quality in the world.

In the weeks and months after the garbage first started blowing into my living room, I came to see this terrible environmental toll as a form of collateral damage: it was the price the country was paying for its rapid growth, for a model of development that elevated prosperity above all else.

For years, India had been skeptical of environmentalists and their concerns. In 1972, Indira Gandhi, then the country’s  prime minister, attended the first United Nations Conference on the environment, in Stockholm, and announced that poverty was the worst form of pollution.

It was a formulation that stuck. People I know who were involved in India’s latent environmental movement during the 70s and 80s remember an uphill struggle. They were accused of elitism, and of being insensitive to the plight of the poor.

Environmentalists like to say that their cause needn’t have a developmental cost, that environmentalism is a win-win proposition. That’s not always true: sometimes, tough choices are required. Tradeoffs have to be made. This is true everywhere in the world (think of the United States’ reluctance to impose a carbon tax for fear that it will stifle jobs), but perhaps especially in a poor country like India.

Increasingly, though, I’ve found myself thinking that after two decades of economic reforms, after a boom that has lifted millions from poverty, India has reached a stage in its growth where Indira Gandhi’s old formulation is breaking down.

Today, economic development and environmentalism are no longer mutually exclusive. Experts estimate that, if it were quantified, the cost of environmental damage in India would shave anywhere from 2.5 to 4 percent off GDP. The nation’s emerging environmental calamity threatens to overshadow–and undermine–its phenomenal growth.

•       •       •       •       •On a cloudy day in November, I took a trip to the beach. It was a twenty-minute drive from my home, a sandy stretch of coconut trees and fishing villages that lined the South Indian coast. I had been going to that beach since I was a boy. I had gone swimming there with my friends, and I had gone fishing in catamarans with local fishermen.

Now, I wasn’t going for a swim, or to fish. I was going because I had heard that large stretches of the beach were being swept away, disappearing into the ocean. Some years ago, the town of Pondicherry, farther down the coast, had built a new harbor. This harbor was supposed to spur development in the area. There was some debate about whether it had done that, but the harbor had indisputably blocked replenishing sand flows carried by currents from the south. Now the beach was starved of nourishment–another victim of the nation’s single-minded quest for development.

I went to the fishing village of Chinnamudaliarchavadi. It was a village I knew well, but I was shocked by what I saw.  A stretch of sand that had once extended for at least a hundred meters was now reduced to a strip of no more than ten or fifteen meters. Trees were uprooted, and fences and compound walls were breached. At least one electricity pole had come down. Houses sat precariously above the waters; some, I was told, had already been swallowed.

Many villagers had moved away, left behind their thatch huts and gone inland, in search of higher ground. They weren’t only leaving their homes behind; they were abandoning their livelihoods (and the livelihoods, too, of their parents and grandparents).

In a hut at the edge of the village, perched above the ocean, I met a widowed mother of two boys. Her name was M. Valli. She told me that every night, at high tide, the waters seeped into the single room of her hut where she tried to sleep with her children. The sound of the waves, she said, was “like an earthquake.”

She showed me her hut. It was tiny, cramped, with only a bare minimum of possessions: a kerosene stove, a cardboard calendar on the wall, a couple pillows on the floor. She said the erosion was destroying her livelihood. She used to buy fish from fishermen and sell them in the local market; now, with the waters advancing, growing increasingly rougher and changing course every day, the catch was down, almost non-existent.

As I was leaving Valli’s hut, one of her friends beseeched me to write about their plight. “If this continues,” she said, “we’re all going to die.”

I walked farther up the coast. I sat on the sand, what was left of it, and I thought of just how little remained of the beach I had known as a boy.

So much was being swept away. So much was being destroyed. I knew it was part of the compact of modern India: In with the new, out with the old, all in the name of progress.

I welcomed the progress. But all the destruction seemed a heavy price to pay.