Bingo. Every couple of years, I teach a "fun" class on post apocalyptic literature. I've been doing it off and on for a decade or so, and every time I do it, I find Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower more and more plausible. It's not a standard "post apocalyptic" work in the sense that there's no big inciting event--no zombies, no big nuclear war, and no asteroid. Instead, it's a world in which everything has just gotten a little worse every year for a long time. It is, in other words, a projection of the current pattern we're seeing in the real world: every year, the weather is a little worse, the fire season a little longer, most people are a little poorer, and the world is a little more violent. It's not a huge difference, but it adds up. Can you remember thinking that 2012 was just peak hellworld? I can, and it looks pretty damn appealing now from here.
The journalist Robert Evans talks about how he prefers "the crumbles" to "the collapse," and I strongly agree. Of course it's possible that there might be some big black swan event that changes everything overnight, but I think it's a lot more likely that we're headed for Butler's Parable world--crumbling infrastructure, crumbling society, crumbling climate, and crumbling morale. In a way, I find this a lot scarier than the more traditional, dramatic collapse scenarios, if only because it makes it a lot harder to get people to act. That old myth about the slowly boiling frog is just that--a myth--but there's a grain of truth in there too, at least with respect to people (suggesting we're dumber than frogs). We're very, very bad at dealing with problems that are diffuse, slow, and causally complex. We're ok at solving big, immediate, catastrophes, but that's not really what we're facing. So we just keep letting things wind down.
Definitely agree, but I think these are different aspects of the same problem. Part of why capitalism has been as successful ("successful") as it has is precisely because humans as a species have a really hard time with long time-horizon planning and problem solving. Our hyper fixation on short term gains under capitalism strikes me as a symptom of that problem.
In addition to that, though, I think climate change is a uniquely challenging problem for us to solve, given our cognitive equipment. Philosophers of climate science like to describe the problem as a kind of "perfect moral storm," where lots of things that are problematic on their own intersect in just the right way to create a really nightmarish problem. On top of the "we suck at planning more than a year or two out" issue, climate change is also spatially distributed and causally attenuated. My emissions from (say) driving my car don't have a measurable negative impact on me (or even my neighbors) right here, but rather spread out across the globe and contribute to an ongoing escalation that is felt worldwide. Likewise, it's basically impossible to attribute any particular impact to any particular agent: something like that California wildfire season is clearly and uncontroversially a result of climate change, but the causal connections between particular actions--me driving to work, the US failing to meet its emissions targets, a particular logging company clear-cutting a range in the Amazon, &c.--are so attenuated as to be basically meaningless. That's not to say that nobody is responsible (or that some relatively small number of people aren't much more responsible than everyone else), but just that our common sense ideas of what "responsibility" or "causation" look like don't really work here, and that more sophisticated concepts are needed.
All that (plus some other things) make reasoning about--and thus combatting--climate change really difficult on a mass scale. It's a kind of problem that we've never really faced before as a species, and it's one that plays right into many of our biggest weaknesses, both individually and at the socio-political level. I used to think that once the impacts of climate change became concrete and started harming people in wealthy nations in direct, obvious ways some of these difficulties might be circumvented. Then COVID happened, though, and I...no longer think that.
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Bingo. Every couple of years, I teach a "fun" class on post apocalyptic literature. I've been doing it off and on for a decade or so, and every time I do it, I find Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower more and more plausible. It's not a standard "post apocalyptic" work in the sense that there's no big inciting event--no zombies, no big nuclear war, and no asteroid. Instead, it's a world in which everything has just gotten a little worse every year for a long time. It is, in other words, a projection of the current pattern we're seeing in the real world: every year, the weather is a little worse, the fire season a little longer, most people are a little poorer, and the world is a little more violent. It's not a huge difference, but it adds up. Can you remember thinking that 2012 was just peak hellworld? I can, and it looks pretty damn appealing now from here.
The journalist Robert Evans talks about how he prefers "the crumbles" to "the collapse," and I strongly agree. Of course it's possible that there might be some big black swan event that changes everything overnight, but I think it's a lot more likely that we're headed for Butler's Parable world--crumbling infrastructure, crumbling society, crumbling climate, and crumbling morale. In a way, I find this a lot scarier than the more traditional, dramatic collapse scenarios, if only because it makes it a lot harder to get people to act. That old myth about the slowly boiling frog is just that--a myth--but there's a grain of truth in there too, at least with respect to people (suggesting we're dumber than frogs). We're very, very bad at dealing with problems that are diffuse, slow, and causally complex. We're ok at solving big, immediate, catastrophes, but that's not really what we're facing. So we just keep letting things wind down.
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Definitely agree, but I think these are different aspects of the same problem. Part of why capitalism has been as successful ("successful") as it has is precisely because humans as a species have a really hard time with long time-horizon planning and problem solving. Our hyper fixation on short term gains under capitalism strikes me as a symptom of that problem.
In addition to that, though, I think climate change is a uniquely challenging problem for us to solve, given our cognitive equipment. Philosophers of climate science like to describe the problem as a kind of "perfect moral storm," where lots of things that are problematic on their own intersect in just the right way to create a really nightmarish problem. On top of the "we suck at planning more than a year or two out" issue, climate change is also spatially distributed and causally attenuated. My emissions from (say) driving my car don't have a measurable negative impact on me (or even my neighbors) right here, but rather spread out across the globe and contribute to an ongoing escalation that is felt worldwide. Likewise, it's basically impossible to attribute any particular impact to any particular agent: something like that California wildfire season is clearly and uncontroversially a result of climate change, but the causal connections between particular actions--me driving to work, the US failing to meet its emissions targets, a particular logging company clear-cutting a range in the Amazon, &c.--are so attenuated as to be basically meaningless. That's not to say that nobody is responsible (or that some relatively small number of people aren't much more responsible than everyone else), but just that our common sense ideas of what "responsibility" or "causation" look like don't really work here, and that more sophisticated concepts are needed.
All that (plus some other things) make reasoning about--and thus combatting--climate change really difficult on a mass scale. It's a kind of problem that we've never really faced before as a species, and it's one that plays right into many of our biggest weaknesses, both individually and at the socio-political level. I used to think that once the impacts of climate change became concrete and started harming people in wealthy nations in direct, obvious ways some of these difficulties might be circumvented. Then COVID happened, though, and I...no longer think that.
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Could you lighten up a bit?
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