Contemplating Catastrophe, Environmentalists Embrace Existentialism

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/539451/contemplating-catastrophe-environmentalists-embrace-existentialism/

[font face=Serif]Richard Martin
July 17, 2015

[font size=5]Contemplating Catastrophe, Environmentalists Embrace Existentialism[/font]

[font size=4] Giving up on climate change means giving up on being human.[/font]

[font size=3]This year’s edition of the State of the Climate Report came out this week from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the news is not good. As expected, 2014 was the warmest year in recorded history. Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide reached an average of 397.2 parts per million for the year, just below the 400-parts-per-million threshold considered by many the point beyond which disaster lies. Sea surface temperatures are higher than ever, and average sea levels rose to a record high. Summer snow melt in the Arctic now occurs nearly a month earlier than the average in 1998–2010. Nearly all the indicators point in the wrong direction.

The relentless grimness of such reports has a numbing effect, leading to a new psychological diagnosis: “climate defeatism.” With the international climate talks in Paris just three months away, many activists, overwhelmed by the inexorable progress of climate change and the utter inability of the world’s governments to slow it, have started to throw up their hands, retreating from a struggle they no longer believe they can win.

The most famous recent example is the British author and environmentalist Peter Kingsnorth, whose embrace of carbon-fueled pessimism was featured in a New York Times Magazine article last year. He further outlined his views in Orion magazine with a nose-thumbing essay called “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist.” In it he bid farewell to activism: “I withdraw, you see. I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching, I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity and all of the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I am leaving. I am going to go out walking.”

…

Addressing an audience at Yale upon receiving the Chubb Fellowship last year, the agrarian writer Wendell Berry, 79, put the same thought another way in arguing against abandoning hope that the climate can be saved: “Hope is a different thing from optimism,” he said. “Optimism and pessimism are based on the idea of how things are gonna turn out. Hope is grounded in the present; it’s not about the future. It’s about the reality of possibilities, this sense of possibility that you can do better. Friends, others give me hope. Hope lives on hope.”[/font][/font]

[Hydra]

1. We're probably screwed

The people in charge defeated almost every effort we made to stop this and every other environmental crime...but even if we are past the tipping point, we're also past Capitalism and the existing social order's tipping point as well.

The people who engineered this disaster are becoming irrelevant. It's time the people who care about the ecosphere we need to survive in become relevant instead.

[GliderGuider]

2. I try to draw a distinction between defeatism and fatalism.

Last edited Sun Jul 19, 2015, 03:14 PM - Edit history (1)

Defeatism is the acceptance of defeat without struggle, often with negative connotations. It can be linked to pessimism in psychology.

Fatalism is a philosophical doctrine stressing the subjugation of all events or actions to fate.

Fatalism involves accepting the inevitability of change, whether the change is defines as good or bad, victory or defeat, or if it's simply change, with no qualitative judgement attached. Defeatism focuses on the inevitability of one kind of change - defeat.

Since we can not predict the outcome of any series of world-scale changes with certainty, fatalism is a far more rational response than defeatism. Defeatists tend to be attached to one particular outcome that they call victory. When that victory is seen to be impossible, the associated sense of loss is what makes them defeatists.

Fatalists on the other hand don't define change in terms of victory or defeat, so there is less of a sense of loss associated with change. This makes accepting change much easier and less likely to result in despair.

Most people don't see it this way, though.

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. I don’t believe in fate

I see belief in “fate,” partly, as a desire to avoid responsibility. (“It’s not my fault; it’s my fate.”)

While it may have been inevitable that one day we would exploit fossil fuels, now that we understand the consequences of doing so, it is irresponsible for us not to address our behavior.

[GliderGuider]

4. Most people share your view on that. nt

[bananas]

5. The article mentions "neo-Spenglerianism", a reference to Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West"

and links to this nice summary of "Decline of the West":

http://www.bayarea.net/~kins/AboutMe/Spengler/McNaughton_Spengler.html

Oswald Spengler and World History
by David L. McNaughton ([email protected])

During the First World War a German historian produced a book which caused quite a stir among intellectuals around the world. By collating events in different (usually non-contemporary) cultures and civilisations, Spengler maintained that it should be possible to fill in gaps in history1, and indeed to set out possibilities for the future, although admittedly only in terms of very broad generalisations.

It was an extremely ambitious undertaking, but after the Second World War his ideas became unfashionable (mainly for political reasons). Nevertheless, Spengler's book is a work of monumental scholarship, discussing in depth such diverse topics as mathematics, music, architecture, painting, theology and money, with brief but still erudite excursions into other subjects including law, chemistry, linguistics, space-time relativity and literature, integrating them all into a single coherent philosophy.

Nine or Ten "Higher Organisms"

Most people find it extremely difficult to accept Spengler's basic thesis, namely that cultures and civilisations are living organisms in their own right2, just like plants, animals and humans, although of a much higher rank. Each culture has its own distinctive soul, which expresses itself in artistic, scientific, political, economic and religious forms.

<snip>

Phases of Development

Just as a human being reaches puberty during the second, and full adulthood in the third decade of life, a culture also passes through phases of predetermined sequence whose durations do not vary greatly from one higher organism to another9. Its "springtime" is characterised by strong religious faith, which slowly gives way to increasing intellectuality and materialism.

<snip>

During the Imperium, people realise the limitations of a purely intellectual view of the universe, so there is a return to religion - based on that of earlier centuries, but differently experienced through having emerged from a more advanced way of life14.

<snip>

Now, regarding that last paragraph, a lot of people understand that we're in some kind of "Imperium", but many don't "realize the limitations of a purely intellectual view of the universe". And that can be a difficult thing to realize.