“Is it too late? Is it hopeless now?” [Audience member question at a book talk.]
. . . .
Whether a situation has moved past the point of no return and is therefore hopeless— truly never-to-be-recovered-from hopeless— partly depends on what we hope will come to pass— that is, on our hope’s object. For instance, we’re not past the point of no return, if we’re hoping that some kind of life will continue on Earth. Even if humanity produces, as the science predicts, a sixth great extinction this century and next— one that eliminates from half to 95 percent of all species— life itself will likely survive in multiple forms (although it could take tens of millions of years for Earth’s panorama of species to recover to today’s levels, if it ever does). Or if we’re merely hoping that our own species will persist, we can be sure that somewhere some people will survive problems like the climate crisis, given that homo sapiens are incredibly adaptable and resilient. But it’s plausibly too late if we’re hoping that human civilization this century and beyond will be just, peaceful, and prosperous.
“Yes,” my fellow author replied gently. “I think it is too late.” The difficulty, he argued, of changing our energy systems, people’s appetites for material things, the commitment of governments worldwide to endless economic growth that gobbles resources and spews out waste, and damage from climate change ensured that by the end of this century societies will be far poorer, more violent, and less free. In fact, he concluded, the widespread collapse of human civilization is a real possibility.
On the surface, I [Thomas Homer-Disxon] couldn’t find a lot to dispute in his answer. After all, when it comes to humanity’s prospects, I’m not generally known as a fount of feel-good optimism. But all the same, something in my colleague’s fair response didn’t seem quite right. In light of my two decades’ study of the behavior of complex systems, I felt his answer implied an omniscience we simply don’t have. When it came time for me to answer, I hesitated for a moment and then said: “I agree…mostly. But I’m not sure that we can say definitively it’s too late— or hopeless— because we simply can’t predict the future behavior of the systems that we’re part of accurately enough to know one way or the other.”
Sobering, but a fair assessment in my estimation.
Mocked by trolls and mobbed by cancelers, denounced from the left for racism and colonialism and from the right as a deep-state conspiracy, the reality-based community feels besieged and looks fragile. Too many of its members may come to believe that disinformation is invincible, that objectivity is indefensible, that viewpoint diversity harms minorities, that words are violence, that canceling is merely criticism.
I fear an accurate characterization: reasoned argument & nuance do seem to be swimming against an especially strong current.
In our context, the peculiar and ingenious replacement of common sense with stringent logicality, which is characteristic of totalitarian thinking, is particularly noteworthy. Logicality is not identical with ideological reasoning, but indicates the totalitarian transformation of the respective ideologies. If it was the peculiarity of the ideologies themselves to treat a scientific hypothesis, like “the survival of the fittest” in biology or “the survival of the most progressive class” in history, as an “idea” which could be applied to the whole course of events, then it is the peculiarity of their totalitarian transformation to pervert the “idea” into a premise in the logical sense, that is, into some self-evident statement from which everything else can be deduced in stringent logical consistency.
Beware of faux-logic! Remember that logic is a tool; it's like a computer in the sense of "garbage in, garbage out." You can logically proceed from most any premise, but what have you gained if your premise is false? Logical baloney!
Conservative realism, on [British conservative Noel] Malcolm’s neo-Hobbesian account could maintain, whereas Christian Democracy could not, a “clear or workable distinction between politics and morality.” By morality, Malcolm had in mind the social-justice thinking of Catholics such as Emmanuel Mounier and Jacques Maritain, which was given papal encouragement in the 1930s. When taking economic liberalism for an illness, the Roman church in the 1890s had judged socialism worse. The encyclical Quadragesimo anno (1931), by contrast, put “economic individualism and the collectivism of expropriation and state ownership,” in Malcolm’s words, into “deeply misleading” symmetry. The later encyclical, that is, took each as bad as the other. That falsified the facts in Malcolm’s view.
The later Greek dialectical schools, especially the Cynics and Pyrrhonists, felt themselves to be based ultimately on the attitude of Heraclitus (supported by the method of Parmenides and Zeno), as the [Buddhist] Madhyamikas felt themselves based on the early Buddhist doctrines of impermanence and not-self. In both cases the antecedent philosophy was one critical of essences. Heraclitus, like Siddartha, recognized a middle position, between A and not-A, that would escape the rigorous closure of an exclusively two-valued logic, which the dichotomy-and-dilemma method shows to be inadequate.
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