In environmental movements and on the left, the fiercest disagreements set against each other people who want the same thing. I propose the concept of the “turning threshold” to describe the moment when a position, through sheer consistency, starts producing the opposite of what was expected of it. Ivan Illich observed this with tools, Albert Camus with rebellion, and Tim Ingold helps me recognise in it a way of moving that he calls transport: heading straight for the goal without looking at what one passes through.
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Rifts between people on the same side
The hardest discussions I witness do not set adversaries against each other, but people who have been committed for decades to ecology, to popular education, to the defence of public services. One thinks that the digital world is an environment where everything depends on how it is used, on who owns it and on who decides. The other replies that the problem is not the use but the tool, and that wanting free digital technology is still wanting digital technology. One criticises the commodification of procreation. The other hears in this criticism an attack on people who turn to assisted reproduction, and immediately files it on the reactionary side. One no longer eats meat, for the animals and for the water that livestock farming requires. The other replies that herds maintain the pastures and that, without them, the limestone uplands become overgrown with scrub and burn.
I am not trying to decide between these positions. I note that each, taken on its own, is consistent, and that each, pushed to its logical conclusion, leads where its supporters did not want to go. Anyone who criticises technology consistently must also reject heart surgery, contraception and abortion, which are techniques applied to the body. If one holds to the end that nature is a social construction, one has nothing left to oppose to transhumanism, since modifying the body is then just one more construction. To defend animals by rejecting all livestock farming is to leave the field open to the companies that make meat in laboratories. Every position has a point beyond which it joins its opposite.
Illich’s two watersheds
Ivan Illich, in Tools for Conviviality (1973), describes, with regard to tools, a movement that I find again in political positions. A tool, he says, passes through two “watersheds”. Once the first is crossed, the tool becomes effective and people gain capacities from it: around 1913, for the first time, a patient had a better than even chance of being genuinely treated by a doctor; people learn to read at school; they travel faster thanks to motorised transport. Between the two watersheds, the tool is useful, and people begin to depend on it. Beyond the second, which he places around 1955 for medicine, the tool turns against its purpose: people fall ill in hospital, leave school no longer able to learn by themselves, sit stuck in the traffic jams of cities built for the car. Illich calls this counterproductivity, and he gives it this formulation:
“When an enterprise grows beyond a certain point on this scale, it first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself.”
Ivan Illich, “Tools for Conviviality”, 1973.
Above all, he shows that the reversal does not come from a misuse of the tool, but from its very development, from its growth beyond a certain scale.
I think a political position also has two thresholds. Once the first is crossed, an injustice becomes visible, and people find the words they lacked. Between the two, those who hold the position organise, gather, and begin to exclude those who do not share it entirely. Beyond the second threshold, the position turns around: in the name of life, care is refused; in the name of freedom, things are forbidden; in the name of animals, people play into the hands of industry. This reversal does not come from betrayal or co-optation. It comes from consistency itself, when it is pushed beyond the point where it still served the cause one was defending. I call this second threshold, applied to positions, the turning threshold. The consistency I am speaking of here is not the one I defended in The social cost of coherence, which consists in bringing one’s actions into line with one’s values, and which I still regard as a common good. It is the logic of a position pushed in a single direction, to the point of forgetting the values for which one held it.
Jocelyne Porcher, a sociologist and former sheep farmer, studies a precise example of this in Cause animale, cause du capital (Animal cause, cause of capital; Le Bord de l’eau, 2019). She distinguishes there between the “animal cause”, an activist movement whose long-standing ties with industry she brings to light, and the cause of animals, that is, what animals actually live through. She shows that the denunciation of industrial violence against animals, just in itself, now serves the interests of companies proposing to replace livestock farming with laboratory-grown meat, and that a movement born to defend animals finds itself preparing a world without domestic animals. Porcher does not conclude that one should stop criticising industry, but that one must say which kind of livestock farming one defends: peasant farming.
The limit within rebellion, in Camus
Albert Camus, in The Rebel (1951), describes a reversal of the same kind on the scale of history. I had already drawn on this book in The institutionalized rebel, to understand how those who criticise an institution often end up running it. The first chapter opens with a definition:
“What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.”
Albert Camus, “The Rebel”, 1951.
The slave who refuses an order affirms at the same stroke that there is something in him that deserves respect, and that this holds for others too. Rebellion therefore carries its own limit within it, since the person who rebels cannot destroy in others what he or she affirms for themselves. Camus calls revolution the moment when this limit is forgotten, when people kill in the name of the value they claimed to defend, and he calls thought at the meridian the thinking of measure, which never loses sight of the limit. Further on he gives a very brief formula for it: “Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom.” Carried to the absolute, each of the two values becomes the negation of the other, without which it loses its meaning, and this is what I call the turning threshold. What I take from Camus is that measure is not a moderation imposed on rebellion from outside, but that it is born of rebellion itself. A rebellion whose limit has been crossed is not more radical; it has changed its nature.
This, I believe, is where people go wrong in the discussions I mentioned at the beginning. They confuse radicality with the distance travelled along a single line, as if the further one went, the more radical one were. But on a sphere, a straight line extended far enough ends up at the antipodes of its starting point, and a position pushed far enough in a single direction leads into the camp of the adversary one first stood facing. Radicality, as I described it in Presence, common ground and self-containment, is an anchoring, not a distance.
Transport and wayfaring, in Ingold
Tim Ingold, in Lines: A Brief History (2007), distinguishes two ways of tracing a line while moving. The first is that of the walker, of the hunter following a trail, of the wanderer: the line is traced as one goes, it winds, stops, sets off again, because the person tracing it looks at what they meet and adjusts each step to what they perceive. Ingold calls this wayfaring, and he notes that “for the Inuit, as soon as a person moves he becomes a line”. The second is transport, where only the point of departure and the point of arrival count, and where whatever lies in between is of no interest. He defines it as follows:
“Transport, then, is distinguished not by the employment of mechanical means but by the dissolution of the intimate bond that, in wayfaring, couples locomotion and perception.”
Tim Ingold, “Lines: A Brief History”, 2007.
Ingold then shows how the straight line, the one that goes from one point to another by the shortest route, has become an icon of modernity, the sign of the triumph of reason over the accidents of the world, and he goes so far as to write that “linearisation, in short, marks not the birth but the death of the line”. Living lines, for him, do not form a network of connections between points, but a meshwork in which paths cross and knot together, and every place is a knot in this meshwork, not a position on a map.
I believe that consistency pushed to the point of reversal is a line of transport. The destination has been fixed, the position held to its end, and one goes there by the shortest route, without looking at what one passes through. Perception is cut off from movement, and that is why the threshold goes unseen at the moment it is crossed: one’s eyes were fixed on the arrival. It is quite different with a position held as wayfaring. One moves forward while looking, stops in front of a ewe that keeps a pasture open, turns back when a woman explains how the critique of technology threatens her right to abortion, and the line one traces bears the mark of these encounters. That line is no less firm than the straight one, but the ewe, the pasture and the woman met along the way have found their place in it.
My own position and its threshold
I have to apply this to myself, otherwise the concept only serves to judge others. I think animal exploitation is one of the gravest questions of our time, because of the suffering it causes and because of the water and land needed to feed livestock rather than people. This position has a first threshold, and I was right to cross it: thanks to it, I saw violence that I had not seen. It has a second threshold, and I know where it lies. If I reject all livestock farming without distinguishing peasant farming from industrial farming, I play into the hands of the cell-cultured meat companies that Porcher describes, and I condemn landscapes that only herds keep alive. If I refuse to hear that a pasture grazed by sheep limits the spread of fires, I put my consistency before reality. I am not giving up my position for all that; I hold it knowing where it turns around.
I suggest that everyone do this work on their own positions: look, for each position one holds, for the point beyond which it would produce the opposite of what one is seeking, and name that point before the adversary does it for us. Whoever knows the turning threshold of their own position can hold it firmly on this side of the threshold, and it remains a strong position. Whereas whoever ignores it will be pushed, by the logic of the debate, to cross it in order to prove their consistency, and their position will turn around without their noticing.
The border as a path
A line of transport has only one direction, and on it one can only be more or less far along. A border, by contrast, has two sides, and it is drawn. I think that disagreements between people on the same side are almost always about where to draw a border, not about direction: how far technology, how far the critique of technology, how far the protection of animals, how far the freedom to dispose of one’s own body. These questions of drawing are not settled by going further, but by naming together what one wants to keep on both sides. And the border I am speaking of is not the straight line of the land register, ruled between two boundary stones, the one Ingold shows has become an icon of modernity. It is a path, in the sense in which Ingold speaks of wayfaring: a line traced by walking it together, attentive to what lies on either side, and which knots with other paths where people meet. It is there, in these knots, that alliances become possible.
I showed in The Simplifying False Nuance that a way of thinking can believe itself nuanced and remain simplistic, and that genuine nuance applies with the same rigour to every subject, including those where one has something to defend, and in Presence and nuance of thought that being nuanced means recognising the subjective part of every point of view, and that democracy depends on it. I add here that nuance makes alliance possible between people who hold strong positions. Two people who each know the turning threshold of their own position can draw a common border between them, because both know that beyond a certain point their consistency no longer serves them. Whereas two people who ignore it can only accuse each other of betrayal, and discussions between people on the same side are full of such accusations. I described in The beginning of a future for the Left how, on the left, people let themselves be won over by the values of the world they were fighting. I believe that part of this drift comes from there, from thresholds crossed one by one by those who held these positions, each wanting to prove their consistency to the others.
I am not proposing to soften positions, but to hold them knowing where their threshold lies, which asks more than holding them without knowing it. And I propose that we no longer ask those who think differently “how far will you go?”, but “where do you put the border, and why there?”. That question is one we can answer together.
