In January 2025, two journalists from the French newspaper Le Monde asked: “Is ‘climate indifference’ on the rise in France?”[1]Audrey Garric et Matthieu Goar, « Assiste-t-on à une progression de l’“indifférence climatique” en France ? », Le Monde, 17 janvier 2025. The quotations that follow (translated into English … Continue reading They answered this question somewhat enigmatically: “Even though citizens are asking the state to pursue policies to combat the greenhouse effect as a priority, they seem less willing to change their lifestyle than they were before”. According to these authors, the French are quick to forget the effects of disasters and are less inclined to take action against the climate crisis. For them, climate disorder has become natural, in both senses of the word: on the one hand, citizens feel that they alone are bearing the burden of restrictive government measures and, on the other, they would prefer not to change their lifestyle. Basically, it would be better to carry on as if nothing had happened and delegate all measures to the government or to those who seem directly concerned – knowing that, in reality, we all are.
In Brazil, the situation is just as paradoxical. Surveys show that most people are aware of climate disasters. However, the “Lula da Silva III government”, in power since January 2023 and the bringer of global hope after the destructive work of its predecessor, is encouraging mass consumerism (especially the purchase of cars), giving even more money to the agribusiness sector and developing oil production throughout the country – thereby putting the Amazon rainforest at risk of irreversible destruction, as the next target is none other than the mouth of the Amazon River.[2]Morgann Jezequel, « En Amazonie, Lula défend des projets qui risquent d’aggraver la déforestation », Courrier International, 12 novembre 2024. And there seems to be no sign of ecological transition. As Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum points out: “Most of us are living in denial, even if we don’t think we are, because if we really were living as though we were in an emergency, we would be doing nothing other than dealing with the climate crisis. It’s like watching your house burn down and sitting on the sofa saying: ‘Let’s wait’, as if we had the time.”[3]Eliane Brum, « Maioria se comporta como negacionistas do aquecimento global », Folha de São Paulo, 13 novembre 2021 [Translated into English from the author’s French translation of the original]. Whether actively, in the case of the elites and the government, or passively, in the case of the population, everyone is helping to push back, or even deny, this crisis, which is increasingly undeniable.
Perhaps one of the greatest challenges in dealing with disasters caused by the climate crisis is the failure of citizens and societies to take effective and necessary measures to anticipate them. Something seems to be paralysing all those involved, transforming what should be a radical experience into a reality deemed natural.
With these introductory observations and various readings of them in mind, this article sets out to consider the challenges that the climate crisis is posing for the humanitarian sector. By definition more responsive to crises, it too is having difficulty taking this particular and universal crisis into account. However unobvious it may seem at first glance, Guy Debord’s core theory can undoubtedly offer us a relevant framework for understanding this problem.
The spectacle as a social relationship
In La Société du spectacle, first published in 1967, Guy Debord updates the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism. He sums up his thoughts as follows: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”[4]Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle, in Oeuvres, Éditions Gallimard, 2006, p. 767 [Translated into English from the French version]. Edition in English, for example : Guy Debord, Society of the … Continue reading The spectacle is therefore a concept which describes the way in which social relations are lived indirectly, through images, most often disseminated by media devices. In other words, it is neither a media theory nor an aesthetic theory, but a critique of society in which sensory and tangible experience is tending to disappear. It should be pointed out – if need be – that Debord’s theory was born at a time when the only “image box” that was just starting to become widespread was the television…
Twenty years later, in 1988, Debord followed this up in an essay entitled Commentaires sur la société du spectacle. In it, he recalls, among other things, his distinction between two fundamental types of spectacle that were dominant during the Cold War. On the one hand, the “diffuse spectacle” described how the Western democratic world governed its citizens through a society based on the centrality of consumption in all its forms. On the other hand, the “concentrated spectacle” found its most developed models in Stalinism, Nazism-Fascism.
In Commentaires, written just before the collapse of the Soviet system, Debord predicted that the diffuse spectacle would eventually prevail. To describe what was emerging on the horizon as an “end of history” (to use Francis Fukuyama’s famous phrase), Debord developed a new concept combining the two previous models: the “integrated spectacle”. He summarised it as follows: “The final sense of the integrated spectacle is that it has integrated itself into reality as it was describing it, and that it was reconstructing it as it was describing it. As a result, this reality no longer faces the integrated spectacle as something alien. When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today, no part. The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality.”[5]Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la Société du spectacle, in Oeuvres, Éditions Gallimard, 2006, p. 1598 [Translated into English from the French version]. It should also be pointed out that, for all intents and purposes, this was before the advent of the Internet and social media …Yet Debord’s “integrated spectacle” actually describes contemporary capitalism, the moment when the real world presents itself as spectacular, tending towards totalisation through consumption, entertainment and war. The massive proliferation of media tools now provides the necessary means of doing so. In our digital world, increasingly fed by artificial intelligence, the spectacle is exacerbated because, in a certain way, consumption, its means and the resulting lifestyle coincide and express themselves through the same object: the screen and digital devices, through which we live and look at the world.
Consent to destroying the other
How can the problem of the “integrated spectacle” be linked to the humanitarian issue? Perhaps another, very recent book by anthropologist Didier Fassin,[6]Didier Fassin, Une étrange défaite : Sur le consentement à l’écrasement de Gaza, La Découverte, 2024. inspired by the author’s wider work, may serve as a guide. His description of the war waged by the Israeli army at the height of the fighting – the book was published less than a year after the attacks of 7 October 2023 – deepens his analysis of the destabilisation already affecting what he called the “humanitarian government” in a book published in 2010,[7]Didier Fassin, La raison humanitaire. Une histoire morale du temps présent, Seuil, 2010. and which he developed in a postscript in 2017. With regard to the deadlock of the war in Gaza, Fassin writes:
“Acquiescence in the Gaza war and its tragic consequences renders illegitimate and ineffective, for a long time, the invocation of human rights and humanitarian reason by those who participated in this moral abdication, even if it must be acknowledged that their ‘double standards’, in many areas, including in their own countries, have long since shorn them of all credibility in this field.”[8]Didier Fassin, Une étrange défaite…, op. cit., p. 139.
He comes to this conclusion after spending several pages describing how, in his opinion, the West consented to the crushing of Gaza. Without ever downplaying the horror of the attack of 7 October 2023, he describes, in detail, the first six months of the colonialist and exterminating response of the State of Israel. For him, it is essential to show how states, the medias and a large proportion of the population of Western countries turned a blind eye to, and even collaborated with or financed, the atrocity that was unfolding whilst, at the same time, the political and media machine tried to silence dissenting voices. Fassin repeatedly points out that the unequal treatment of Israeli and Palestinian victims by the West is partly due to the emotional and physical distance that separates the two sides. He observes that tanks and bombing appear to be more impersonal than the Hamas attacks of October 2023.[9]Didier Fassin, Une étrange défaite…, op. cit., p. 131-132.
To borrow familiar words from Debord, everything is happening as if the two sides involved in the war were separated by a spectacular and insurmountable distance, resulting in the blindness, consent and even denial of Western people and states in the face of the event. The crushing of others is even perceived as a total media spectacle: in the age of digital capitalism,[10]See Cédric Durant, Technoféodalisme. Critique de l’économie numérique, Éditions La Découverte, 2020. watching continuous images of war or disasters, paralysed, is – perversely – tantamount to consuming them whilst transforming them into a spectacle. All things considered, the battle in the air, which reveals the technological gap between the missiles launched by Hamas or Hezbollah and Israel’s Iron Dome interception system, is also being experienced through images broadcast from both sides of the frontline. Fear for some, hope for others, a desire for vengeance for many – all sorts of emotions emerge from the barrage of images that war produces.
Yet how can we make the link between this intuition about the spectacular future of war and the climate crisis, and then be in a position to understand the implications for the humanitarian world? Let us go back to Fassin and his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 2023, when he covered a whole host of crises. He stressed that understanding the climate crisis as a threat to humanity is a very recent development, and one that is still insufficient. Comparing it to the COVID-19 crisis, he said: “Although much more worrying, climate change – which affects wealthy countries less than poor countries – is not generating the same sense of fear and urgency. Covid was with us, unexpected and sudden. Climate change is expected and gradual. Its most serious effects are still to come.”[11]Didier Fassin, Sciences sociales par temps de crise. Leçon inaugurale prononcée au Collège de France le jeudi 30 mars 2023, Éditions Collège de France, 2024, … Continue reading He thus makes a fundamental observation: that countries differ in terms of the effects they undergo and that this creates a lack of fear and urgency among people and states alike. These observations can help us explore the link between the humanitarian crisis and the climate crisis in greater depth.
Basically, what Fassin seems to have discerned when he says that Gaza is imposing a moral and material limit on humanitarian interventions, is that this extreme situation could well apply to other sectors. At a time when the number of climate disasters is on the increase, several territories around the world are descending into violence and the integrity of many populations is under threat, it seems possible that the consent to the crushing of others and the obsolescence of humanitarianism, as identified by Fassin, are taking on new forms. As the Brazilian and French cases indicate, we may be witnessing a massive disengagement of populations, governments and states from the measures needed to contain the climate crisis – that is, a willingness to accept the death and suffering brought by the destabilisation of ecosystems. This is all the more likely given that the “spectacularisation” of climate disasters seems to push back this death and suffering quite a long way in time and space, even though they are already present here and now.
The ambiguity of individual ethics
In their history of the present day, Overshoot, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton identify a new phenomenon regarding the climate crisis. Consciously or not, people and states are letting the process of global warming unfold as a natural course of events – even though it may lead to their own annihilation. Despite all the knowledge we have accumulated and, not least, the increasing number of disasters throughout the world, humanity continues to deny this crisis situation. The limit of 1.5°C or 2°C, which was intended to give us a chance to reverse the process, is about to be exceeded – if it has not already been. The existence of life on Earth, and even the survival of humanity as a whole, is in serious danger. How is it possible that there is no large-scale collective action with such a threat looming over us?
Beyond the empirical research needed to reconstruct recent history, this book pays “attention to the psychic dimensions of the climate crisis, notably the tremendous capacity of people in capitalist society to deny and, when this no longer works, repress it”.[12]Wim Carton and Andreas Malm, Overshoot:How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Éditions Verso, 2024, p. 11. On the one hand, the ruling classes are trying to mitigate the impact of the crisis on their way of life and consumption, but without actually changing them. On the other, the masses find themselves paralysed in their impotence. Hence the question that steers their investigation: “What spell had been cast on this world that just would not be broken?”[13] Wim Carton and Andreas Malm, Overshoot…, op cit., p. 8. Perhaps this is precisely because of the spectacular way in which this process is experienced and followed by everyone.
The French sociologist Bruno Latour offers an interesting and quite similar hypothesis with regard to the ruling classes. He suggests that they are aware of the magnitude of the climate crisis, but have chosen to act in their own interests. To avoid changing their way of life, they have opted for denial and have indefinitely (even ad infinitum?) postponed the radical measures needed to curb the crisis, whilst also helping to maintain the scepticism and paralysis of societies in the face of the looming catastrophe. On the one hand, the elites break away and live outside society. On the other hand, they reinforce their spectacular domination over the rest of the population by intervening directly and indirectly in states and governments, by acting as the ruling class itself, and encouraging general paralysis through entertainment and mass consumption.[14] Bruno Latour, Où atterrir ? Comment s’orienter en politique, Éditions La Découverte, 2017, p. 28-38 et p. 74-84. With Trump 2.0 in power, notes Branko Milanović, we are witnessing a turning point in history: the end of the legitimacy of democratic neo-liberalism. He also suggests that, much more than the far right, it is the liberal ruling elites, in association with multinationals and the state, which have dynamited the foundations of the old post-Cold War political arrangement.[15]Branko Milanović, “How the mainstream abandoned universal economic principles”, Brave New Europe, 8 January 2025, … Continue reading As the freezing of US international aid funds dramatically demonstrates, humanitarian policies and all measures aimed at containing the climate crisis are seriously threatened by the shift in US policy.
With globalisation, consumerism has become one of the major features of the contemporary way of life. It has taken such a hold that it is becoming difficult to imagine that we could access things and life other than through the consumption of goods.[16]Fredric Jameson, Valence of the dialectics, Éditions Verso, 2010, pp. 443–445 Ethical consumption is a blatant example of the contemporary face of the problem. It has roots in the “humanitarian” mobilisations of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as the boycott of goods derived from slavery, and continued into the twentieth century through the campaigns led by non-governmental organisations for a so-called “ethical” capitalism, which in reality is neo-liberal.[17]Tehila Sasson, The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire, Princeton University Press, 2024. Estelle Ferrarese[18]See Estelle Ferrarese, Le marché de la vertu. Critique de la consommation éthique, Éditions Vrin, 2023. notes that in the context of the climate challenge, such a practice shifts consumption towards products that are seemingly less aggressive and morally more acceptable in terms of society and the environmental crisis. The middle classes and economic or intellectual elites want to continue consuming as they did in the past, but in an ethical manner. Nature plays a major role here because it carries a lost charge of authenticity, which we can paradoxically recover through our own consumption. According to Ferrarese, it is ultimately a way of changing life without changing anything substantial, in order to continue experiencing the climate crisis as if nothing had happened. In a way, it is like giving to a charity without questioning or acting on the situation that makes its actions necessary.
Another aspect of today’s consumerism that hinders action and even poses an environmental threat in itself, as mentioned above, is the uninterrupted consumption of all kinds of images, regardless of their content, through screens and digital devices. In addition to social alienation, the existence of digital technology itself represents an ecological problem on three main levels: firstly, the amount of energy required to operate it; secondly, the need for a massive infrastructure; and finally, the increasing demand for raw materials, which are found practically all over the world.[19]See Fabrice Flipo, La Numérisation du monde. Un désastre écologique, Éditions l’Échappée, 2021. The contemporary integrated spectacle therefore has three main facets: firstly, the excessive use of digital devices; secondly, the ideological constructs that provide a sufficient psychological pretext to justify the pursuit of the contemporary way of life; and lastly, the way in which society helplessly watches climate and humanitarian disasters unfold on a daily basis.
The various facets of the contemporary integrated spectacle are now interacting in a society paralysed by the urgency of the situation, with no measures or decisions – individual or collective – actually being taken in the radical way they should be. It remains to be seen how and if humanitarian organisations, as well as the whole community which revolves around them, are capable of intervening directly in the spectacular course of the world to reverse the situation and the catastrophic direction it is taking. Otherwise, in a manner that will vary according to each person’s social and geographical position, the destruction of humanity and life on the planet could become a spectacle that we watch through all the digital devices of the integrated spectacle in which we are immersed.
The author would like to thank Eleanor Davey for her suggestions and comments on the final version of this text
Translated from the French by Derek Scoins
