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Collapse
Awareness And The Tragic Consciousness
By
Jamey Hecht
Infinite
growth on a finite planet is suicide. Industrialization is destroying
the world. Resource depletion, pollution, and climate change will
make industrial civilization impossible much sooner than is generally
admitted.
It
is traumatic to realize this, and the process involves an intense
need to discuss the issue. But the predicament of everyone, the
squirrels, the trees, the elephants, all of humankind, the acid
oceans caked with plastic — how to discuss all that with oneself or
anyone else? Daily there are more people consciously concerned with
it, yet most of the discussion happens online, not face to face; in
person, with a few exceptions, one
simply does not discuss it.
To do so reminds people of the terrible danger in which they are
already living their everyday lives; it also delivers them over to
difficult feelings of helplessness (they cannot stop climate change),
humiliation (the “legal person” called Exxon-Mobil is more
powerful than mortals can imagine), and anomie (what matters on a
doomed world?). Activating those difficult feelings is, at the very
least, rude — even if the values of both parties to the
conversation are largely in accord. So it costs something to go ahead
and disrupt the game and hold forth about the state of our world, so
people generally don’t do it.
The
phenomenon of collapse is so frightening that the trauma of realizing
it has to be mastered in a way that derives meaning, or deposits
meaning, or configures meaning, or some basket of verbs that will
comprise the spectrum of how this stuff called meaning comes to be,
in and through the pain of awareness. Meaning is the redeemer which
leads people to hope — and when hope is shattered, it is meaning
that sweeps up the fragments and sculpts them into monuments and
tombstones. Success of body is survival; success of soul is making
sense of loss in a mortal world. Sometimes both of these successes
are available, sometimes one or the other, or at the worst, neither.
I
believe a real physical metamorphosis of civilization into a
harm-reducing culture was still possible until just a few years ago.
Most people continue to believe it possible still; they haven’t
changed their minds about that yet. Possible or not, it is
vanishingly improbable — not as a lottery win or a bet at a
roulette wheel is unlikely, where the problem-space happens to
include a large number of equally unlikely outcomes, but as victory
is unlikely in a war between equal armies after one side is decimated
while the other is unscathed. Maybe the last ten green-shirted
soldiers will somehow slaughter their remaining thousand
black-shirted opponents — it is philosophically “possible” —
but everything speaks against its occurrence.
The
infinite growth paradigm is held in place by huge structural forces
and institutions that militate with overwhelming effectiveness
against any change to the omnicidal practice of industrial
civilization. As Wittgenstein observed, only a philosopher could
doubt that the Sun will rise in the morning. When the facts have
driven from the field all other kinds of doubt, philosophical doubt
remains, an exotic hothouse flower with no application in the real
world. So it is with hope, after material conditions have so
deteriorated that more data can only darken the prospects. One’s
hope for the world contracts, shifting from a region of defensible
truth-claims to a region of adaptive illusion, an illusion which
keeps on shrinking as the data win through the defenses erected
against them.
One
strategy for preserving hope in the face of this process is to
recalibrate one’s hopes, scaling them down so that the smallest of
victories will count as a great “yes” from the universe. Even if
only a few thousand people survive on some high ground in the Arctic
temperate zone, goes this notion, that will be a seed from which
culture can one day rise again. “Maybe 200 million people will
migrate close to the Arctic and survive this,” writes James
Lovelock in The
Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis & The Fate of
Humanity (2007).
This meme may be true (I tend to believe it, myself); but true or
not, it is a useful one if it can supply enough meaning to help
people through the task of living out the decades of the crisis (say,
until the bottleneck is over, the 6.8 billion are dead, and the
survivors are busy nibbling acorns in Siberia). But there are
negations of it, including both a contrary and a contradiction. The
contrary is that there may be no saving remnant; the contradiction is
a rejection of the implicit premise that survival in such a world is
a good thing.
This
mental struggle demands repeated recourse to the evidence, with its
hierarchical structure ascending from vast domains of raw data, up
through peer reviewed articles, then to science journalism, then to
popular journalism, and finally to the mainstream media of mass
culture. People generally begin at this apex, where it’s all belief
and no knowledge. Some then work their way down toward the stark
facts (the “desert of the real”), losing their illusions as they
go, and stopping at the limits of their tolerance. As the available
uncertainty shrinks, it affords less and less skepticism about the
severity of our predicament. The more time you spend at the lower
levels of the pyramid, the less company you have. Your ugly knowledge
eclipses their beautiful beliefs.
These
beliefs (which form one composite belief, the normal outlook) are
mostly fossils from the 18th Century, including an omnipotent
Patriarch in the sky who governs by reward and punishment; an
invisible hand tuning a free market in which the necessary non-market
institutions (e.g., rule of law) arise
spontaneously; and most
importantly, infinite economic growth on a finite planet.
A
few steps down from that popular Cloud-Cuckooland are the more recent
notions of “sustainable growth”; substitution of unspecified new
resources for old depleted ones; and the mitigation of endemic
pollution by the natural “services” of heroic trees, microbes,
and Time that heals all wounds.
Deeper
down than this, in turn, is the realization that growth itself is the
problem. But every day, the excellent proposals for managed economic
contraction, or “powerdown” (Heinberg, 2004), and steady state
economics (e.g., Daly, 1991, and Czech, 2013) go unused, while
civilization grinds the biosphere to nothing.
The necessary actions
which these proposals require (things like depaving, or a moratorium
on the petrochemical industry, or the Rimini Protocol, which calls
for fair distribution of the world’s remaining oil) are unthinkable
by public officials and corporate executives. Petrodollar hegemony as
U.S. fiat money “buying” free oil is actively defended by the
mightiest military, financial, and political forces in the world,
backed by the inertia of a billion “first-world” people like us,
who apparently cannot stop destroying the Earth unless we somehow
acquire a great raft of missing skills and opportunities. That level
of awareness is already somewhat traumatic. It can foreclose one’s
idea of a human future, if it comes to include enough of the many
stressors available to the curious. Climate change, peak oil, potable
water scarcity, and the eventual failure of several hundred nuclear
reactors (in a world without reliable electricity to cool spent fuel
rods) comprise a quartet that will likely devastate all the systems
on which our lives depend, most especially agriculture.
Faced
with such a mental foreclosure, one has perhaps only three choices:
one can go back down into the ever-expanding galaxy of data and
search some more — either for hope, or for that dark certainty
which makes despair into a solid resting place amid the nauseous
vertigo of conflicting arguments and hypotheses, models and
calculations. Or one can use one’s remaining uncertainty to trigger
a switch in one’s head that will act like the “restore”
function in an electronic device, deleting all the painful knowledge
and restoring the comfortable illusions to which our minds have been
accustomed for so long — this time, haunted by a repressed penumbra
of awareness. The remaining alternative is to rest one’s case
within the limits of human knowledge. Nobody knows the exact date
when the last fish in the ocean will die, the hour when Shakespeare
will be forgotten, the moment when the thermohaline current fails, or
the instant when methane (CH4) overtakes carbon dioxide (CO2) as the
chief driver of global warming. Nobody knows the date of his own
death, either, yet we all know we must die someday.
It
is well to point out (Greer, 2009) that apocalyptic claims
have always proven
erroneous in the past, and they may do so again. But the human past
never included environmental stressors that were planet-wide, beyond
which there can be no appeal. Fossil aquifers and fossil fuels cannot
renew, except on a geological timescale irrelevant to human affairs.
Radioactive elements (like nuclear waste, nuclear plant leakages, or
the depleted uranium the U.S. shot all over Iraq,) have half-lives in
the thousands and even millions of years. Four hundred ppm of CO2
makes for a hell of a greenhouse effect, complete with positive
feedback loops; the most dangerous of these is the methane cascade
problem. There is no remaining “New World” by which to repeat the
surprise of 1492 — the frontier is closed, and the world is round.
Drop
a baseball from the top of the Empire State Building, and there will
be many opportunities to point out that it is going down and must hit
the ground. Each presents a corresponding opportunity to reply that
yes, it may be going down, but it hasn’t hit — and that you
pessimists have repeatedly claimed that it’s going to hit the
ground, yet it still hasn’t, so maybe it never will. So it is with
claims of apocalypse.
Impressed
by the magnitude of the converging crises, we become convinced that
there is no future for the cultural lifeworld that produced and
shaped our minds. Whatever will be in place after our natural lives
are over, it will not be an industrialized civilization using fossil
fuels to produce goods, send information and tricycles around the
world, and sustain seven billion people.
But
we, who are writing or reading this now, will our natural lives be
cut short by the crises? The biblical lifespan of “threescore and
ten” still holds in some places, whereas the average life
expectancy of Switzerland and Japan is 83 years, and in Sierra Leone,
it’s 47 (World Health Organization, 2011). We wonder how many of us
will live to be killed “directly” by climate change, or energy
scarcity — but the questions don’t make sense, since millions
have already been killed in climate-related natural disasters,
including agricultural failures. Deforestation is as old as
civilization (Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the forest spirit Humbaba,
long before writing is invented). But the real danger is the
mechanized version, hooked into an economy of endless debt chasing
endless growth through endless extraction and endless consumption.
Carbon pollution is as old as Homo erectus burning wood, but it is
coal, oil, mine tailings and nuclear radiation that make for a world
of toxic filth.
While
we urge each other to wear colored ribbons and “search for the
cure” for the cancers that killed 7.6 million people worldwide in
2008, we all should know that a high cancer rate is
simply the price we pay for living in industrial society — not a
personal lifestyle mistake, nor a discrete pathogen that some people
happen to catch. As Helen Caldecott famously said, “When you get
your cancer, it doesn’t come with a label on it that says, I
was made by some Strontium-90 from Three Mile Island in a piece of
cheese that you ate ten years ago.”
The presence of all this pollution feels like a horrible violation
from without, until we remember our own role in the pollution, the
depletion, the collapse.
Reading
of toxic waste dumping and spills and the evasive, illegal, violent
conduct of the corporations responsible, we feel bitter resentment.
We also yearn for the impossible return to the pre-pollution Earth;
to undo what was done and so restore the world: impossible
engineering problem, to “clean up” fourteen decades of industrial
poisoning of the entire planet. It’s still happening, every day,
with the folks at Monsanto using petroleum byproducts to make toxins
for killing plants and animals considered undesirable. The toxins
pervade the whole biosphere including the bodies of people, where
they do all manner of cytological mischief that tends to cut life
short in one way or another. What to do with the rage, the
helplessness, the bitterness that this arouses? Try to deflate it
with the thought that these are simply the conditions in which we
find ourselves, the matter will have to be accepted?
Our
cardiovascular system requires both exercise and clean air, and
driving to work diminishes both. Why don’t we walk to work? Because
the office is 25 miles from any half-pleasant residential area; the
company won’t relocate, and jobs are scarce — so while there are
jobs to drive to, we drive to them, again and again and again, until
the cost of gasoline is more than the job can pay. That’s when we
stay home for a desperate and protracted garage sale.
The
oxygen added to the atmosphere each year comes from two main sources,
half from the Amazon Rainforest, and half from plankton and algae in
the oceans. Those living systems are rapidly failing. One need not
know the precise rate of oxygen depletion to see that there is a
serious problem here. But what exactly am I to do that might slow the
destruction of these two biomes? I can stop buying Amazonian
hardwood, but I have never bought Amazonian hardwood. Product
boycotts against the logging industry can have little influence on
the cattlemen and the enslaved (or semi-enslaved) campesinos whose
slash-and-burn clear-cutting of the forest continues apace.
A
vegetarian diet might help limit the U.S. market for the cattle that
graze on lands stolen from the rainforest, and it appears meat
consumption in this country is at last beginning to decreasei —
though world meat consumption is still rising.ii A
recent Brazilian government crackdown on illegal logging and ranching
has been remarkably effective; though deforestation keeps on going,
it has slowed
considerably, dropping roughly 80% since its most
recent peak in 2004.iii Even under the crackdown,
abuse continues; now in 2013, Brazil is considering fines for 26 meat
companies that illegally bought Amazon-reared cattle.iv The
corporations responsible include giants like Cargill, who grow soy
for McDonald’s to feed to chickens and cattle. Many of the stages
in the deforestation process are illegal; even Cargill’s physical
plant in Santarem was built illegally.v So the
problem would seem to be a failure of the rule of law, under
neoliberal finance and trade arrangements that identify the
well-being of nations with the profit levels of their corporate
overlords. Says the Woods Hole Research Center, “Simply
implementing existing laws and proposed protected areas would spare
the Amazon one million square kilometers of deforestation (one fifth
of the entire forest area), avoiding 17 billion tonnes of carbon
emissions to the atmosphere, the elimination of several forest
formations, and the degradation of several major watersheds.”vi A
massive boycott of McDonald’s might help, but the main reason
people eat highly processed industrialized food is because subsidies
and economies of scale make it far cheaper than eating real food.
Legislation is unlikely to change that, because the power of the
agribusiness lobby is so formidable. So the oxygen from the Amazon is
getting scarce.
What
about the oxygen from the oceans? As of 2010, plankton had declined
by 40% since 1899, with most of the loss occurring over the past
sixty years.vii Let me quote from a flyer from
National Geographic called “10 Things You Can Do to Save the
Ocean.” Here is item three:
Use Fewer Plastic Products
Plastics that end up as ocean debris contribute to habitat destruction and entangle and kill tens of thousands of marine animals each year. To limit your impact, carry a reusable water bottle, store food in nondisposable containers, bring your own cloth tote or other reusable bag when shopping, and recycle whenever possible.
Use
fewer plastic products, in the hope that this will lower demand and
cause industry to produce less plastic. The U.S. Energy Information
Administration says: “In the United States, plastics are made from
liquid petroleum gases (LPG), natural gas liquids (NGL), and natural
gas. LPG are by-products of petroleum refining, and NGL are removed
from natural gas before it enters transmission pipelines.”viii The
petroleum gets refined to make liquid fuels, mainly gasoline. The
plastics are made from by-products of that refining process, so as
long as there is gasoline production there will be the production of
liquid petroleum gases (LPG) and the temptation to cook them into
plastics for cheap products and applications, destined for the
oceans.
The
process of realizing the awful state of our world has been likened to
the famous “five stages of grief” of Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who
was describing the changing mentality of a dying person — rather
than the transformation of a witness to a dying world (or a species
entering a bottleneck, decimation, or even extinction). That model
has its merits, and people who find out that their world is ending
certainly do deny, get angry, bargain, get depressed, and sometimes
(though I have seen very little of this) they accept it. But the
model only goes so far, and it says little about how these movements
from stage to stage are to be achieved. If not by these fives stages,
how else are we to think about the state of things in the world at
large?
“The
tragic consciousness” is a slippery thing, and I’m not fully sure
what it means, nor even where I first heard it. I associate it with
Nietzsche’s Birth
of Tragedy,
but he doesn’t seem to use it in that text. It’s a phrase
literary scholars and critics have invented to describe the
paradoxical effect of the tragic drama, where the observer
experiences a strangely elevated mood after watching a sympathetic
figure get destroyed by the gods, by society, by the entailments of
his or her own mistakes. The material is miserable, and yet it elates
us. The effect has something to do with what Aristotle called
catharsis, where the story purges us of pity (which we feel for the
figure on the stage, since he is doomed where we are safe) and terror
(which we feel for ourselves, since we identify with him on the basis
of a shared humanity and a shared (i.e., mortal) predicament. But
catharsis is only a part of it.
The
tragic consciousness seems to require that we become witness to the
whole story.
It is this narrative completeness that grounds a story’s moral
complexity, making it a good story for grownups. Children can only
tolerate so much moral complexity, so the characters in children’s
literature tend to be split-off aspects of the author, all good or
all bad. In Shakespeare, by contrast, even the most despicable
villains have a back-story that secures some of our sympathy. The
horror film and the melodrama do not provide such a back-story; the
drama must do so, because it requires conflict, and all parties to
the conflict must have at least a modicum of our sympathy or the
story will fail us. The worse the character’s behavior (e.g.,
Macbeth, Richard III, Claudius), the more we require a frame-story
that will answer the question of how a reasonable person could
possibly come to this.
Interestingly,
that is the same question psychotherapists are asked to consider when
they get a client who challenges their sense of decency, perhaps a
client whose humanity is hard to find (Orange, 2006). Learn the
back-story behind the personality (or behind the pathology, or the
crime) — usually a traumatic ordeal, acute or chronic or both —
and the person appears in a very different light because now the
ugliness has a meaning. The branch of psychoanalysis called
attachment theory is an ethics in its own right, but not in the sense
of providing a prescriptive morality with which to respond to the
world. Confronted with destructive traits in a person or persons,
attachment theory derives the presenting antisocial behaviors from
early experiences of neglect or rejection or abuse. Again and again
this recourse to etiology is the prelude to therapeutic connection,
and to meaning. How did you become this? Why are you as you are? What
happened to you?
In
the practice of nonviolence, similarly, we are asked to consider how
our opponents got to where they are — how they acquired their
racism, or greed, or cruelty, etc. — in order to love the human
beings beneath the history. Without knowing what that history is, we
have to invent it, because there simply must be some mitigating,
explanatory factors which do not excuse, but do make sense of, what
we confront across the table or the barricades.
The
discipline of history, if it is to be more than a catalogue of facts,
requires a streak of ethical reflection (I don’t mean moral
judgment, but a search for empathic understanding). When that streak
becomes the heart of the project, the result can be called
psychohistory; when it fails to appear, the result is propaganda. An
account of the past is satisfying only when it includes the past of
the past. Within limits, the task is to provide enough moral
complexity for the various actors to appear fully human. Nothing can
ever begin to excuse the horrific, soul-destroying cruelty of the
Nazis. But coping with an awareness of it does seem to require some
reflection on its roots in the national German humiliation of the
Treaty of Versailles and its aftermath, and more importantly, the
disastrous childrearing culture of much of the German speaking world
in the relevant period. For them, no excuse; for us, an explanation.
Regard
what happened on this planet as a tragic drama played out before the
eyes of eternity. A dangerous species got hold of vast amounts of
energy, and all hell broke loose — four degrees centigrade average
global surface temperature rise. The large scale use of fossil fuels
can be seen, with the foreshortening of time, to have been a kind of
explosion. It is a slower explosion than the meteor impact that ended
the Cretaceous, but it’s still a liberation of fiery energy.
We
can only stare at the tragic stupidity of it, the iron necessity that
the yeast will eat all the sugar in the vat, then die off; so the
reindeer and the lichen; so the humans and the world.
Population
tracks energy use. That’s another aspect of the explosive nature of
the discovery of fossil fuels. Explosive like the fuels themselves,
their advent causes population to skyrocket, till it overshoots the
available resource base, and begins a crash. Everyone knows this.
What may be slightly less familiar is the way meaning can be
recovered in the contemplation of that process, perhaps even while it
is going on.
Danger
activates our anxiety, because the threat has not yet attacked and
there is still time to escape or overcome it with vigilance and
action. But the Holocene is over, and now we are staring at a near
future of catastrophic warming, no matter what we do. Anxiety still
has its place in such a predicament, unless we are indifferent to the
welfare of ourselves and those we love — a position only the stoics
and sociopaths can fully share. But like depression or self-hate,
anxiety is an affliction that can (with sufficient effort and
neurological luck) be bounded; it can be managed, delimited,
corralled, if we come to realize that, in some domains, anxiety has
no benefits, only costs. The fate of the world is such a domain. It
might make sense to worry how we and our people will get through it,
how we will survive to the age of seventy or eighty years which many
of us grew up anticipating, or how we will avoid death as long as we
can in a hot, stormy world of droughts, flood, fires, pollution, and
failing agriculture. But it will not make much sense — not mean
much — to think of the whole story with anxiety. No, the whole
story is something weirdly graced with an aesthetic and narrative
completeness that we borrow from the future to make sense of the past
and present.
In
our individual lives we sometimes extrapolate into the imaginary
future in order to see the journey from birth to death as a sculpted
thing, carved out by the many hands of chance and choice, but
ultimately complete and unified. On my deathbed, one says to oneself,
I shall say something like this: I was born, I did the following
things, I was this sort of person, I strove to behave in these ways
when I could, these events then befell me, and ultimately, in
circumstances of this kind, I perished. We seek for ourselves (if
only for a moment on occasion) the encapsulated meaningfulness of an
obituary or a clinical vignette. That is, I suggest, what we find
ourselves doing when we contemplate our species’ emergence, rise,
and crashing decline.
Unlike
those amazingly stable organisms, the shark and the turtle and the
clam, that stayed the same for hundreds of millions of years, ours is
a young species that changed very quickly. There are several
inflection points in the story, like the rise of the late Paleolithic
toolkit, or the origin of agriculture in the Neolithic period, that
introduce nonlinear explosive change, and the advent of fossil fuels
is the biggest of these. One can perhaps imagine a
timeline in which fossil fuels are never discovered, or never
developed in commercial quantities, but that is not what happened.
With the counterfactual in mind, we say it could have been different
and so we experience the disaster as a waste, a stupid mistake, a
crime. It is all of those things, but when we push the counterfactual
away and focus on what did happen,
the picture changes. It becomes tragic.
Choose
a tragic hero, and you will find that his or her hubris was avoidable
— but only in a different world, or with a different inner
character. For the protagonist, his past actions were inevitable, and
we can tell because the story includes them and not the alternatives.
Only from a pragmatist-utilitarian standpoint is the lesson of,
say, Moby-Dick that
one ought not to pursue revenge at all costs, or that of Oedipus that
one ought to avoid fighting older men and coupling with older women.
Those are prudent lessons, but they are not the point of the tragedy.
When it is too late for prudence or virtue, wisdom loses its ethical
character and becomes a mostly aesthetic phenomenon. Young people
watch the tragic drama and seize on the pragmatist lessons to be
found in it, which they generally find disappointing: don’t act
like Creon in Antigone,
who insisted he was right. Don’t be like Shylock, whose lack of
mercy ultimately destroyed him. Don’t do as Agamemnon did,
sacrificing family for ambition. Youth has to be concerned with
prudence because it has its whole life ahead of it. The older the
audience at the tragic drama, the more they appreciate the
heartbreaking symphony of free will, divine command, arbitrary fate,
and personal character that comprises the whole story. Tragic heroes
do what they do for manifold reasons, the heart of which is human
nature: we
are the animal that does this.
So it is with our destruction of the planet we loved.
All animals
in an isolated environment (like a vat, an island, or the Earth) do
as we did, when they consume the available resources in a finite
system until they overshoot the system’s carrying capacity and
begin to die off. If we are unusual in that we became aware of what
we were doing (because of our distinctly human intelligence, much of
which we turn out to share with several other species, after all), we
are also unusual (though again, not alone) in our tendency to ignore
warnings when our identity is involved. We did not lower our energy
consumption because it would have been a return to weakness,
femininity, childhood, helplessness, all the things industrial
civilization fears and hates the most. Just as in Greek drama or
Shakespearean tragedy, this fear-of-the-wrong-thing determines our
fate and defines us in the universe.
For
me, these days, and perhaps for you, coping is a two-handed job: one
hand holds the despair which must somehow be held (contained,
regulated, bounded); the other holds the tools with which we must
make our attempts to adapt.
_____________________
iiiAmazon
deforestation rate lowest ever recorded. December 5, 2011.
http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/amazon-deforestation-rate-lowest-point-1988.html
ivBrazil
may fine beef producers buying Amazon cattle. April 15, 2013.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/15/brazil-beef-fines-idUSL2N0D22F920130415
vGreenpeace
factsheet, 2006, citing interview with Felecio Pontes Jr., Federal
Prosecutor, Belem, Pará State, ‘In the name of Progress’.
Greenpeace 2005
viThe
Amazon in 2050: Implementing the law could save a million square
kilometres of rainforest. Woods Hole Research Center, 22 March 2006
viiThe
dead sea: global warming blamed for 40% decline in the oceans’
phytoplankton. Steve Connor, The Independent, July 20, 2010.
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