Carter,
Thanks for your very thoughtful and considered essay about “Don’t Look Up” and your reflections that the film prompted. You’ve written a terrific essay. It’s prompted some reflections on my part that I share below. It’s in the way of a concurring opinion, not a dissent.
This film also strikes me as an example of preaching to the choir, which, on first reflection, seems like a waste of time. They are the saved. And yet, even those who seem among the elect suffer from periods of doubt and discouragement. Sometimes their faith, the strongest among the members of the congregation, needs reinforcement and affirmation in the face of discouragement and doubt. “Don’t Look Up” is a film for the choir members, and like you, I doubt it will serve to garner many converts. How to convert those who’ve not yet accepted the word—the reality— we speak of? This is the Cassandra problem, the challenge of the prophets. It is—and has been, in its various manifestations throughout history—a challenge of the greatest urgency in the face of imminent threats.
I’m quite in agreement that a fundamental challenge lies in dealing with climate change and environmental degradation as a set of political issues. (Climate change is the most obvious and pressing subset of the wider issue of environmental degradation.) Climate change is a political challenge in the immediate sense as a set of concerns about the operation of political institutions. In the wider sense, political issues shade into issues of culture and its manifestations as worldviews, mass psychology and behavior, and political economies. Let me address each in turn.
In the immediate sense, we’re dealing with a failure of American political institutions. Extreme polarization and a refusal to adapt our democracy to changing circumstances have rendered many of our institutions, especially Congress, virtually moribund. While I agree that public opinion has come around in some measure to acknowledge the reality of climate change, the conversion—to the extent some have been converted—is largely notional at this point. Many may recite the creed, but few live the faith. (And most of the credit for recent conversions must go to Mother Nature, who, with her wildfires, Derechos, droughts, heatwaves, polar vortexes, floods, tornados, and hurricanes—to mention only her loudest outbursts—deserves the credit for most recent conversions.)
I contend that we must repair American democracy if we are to create a polity that can address the deeper, more fundamental issues raised by climate change. Of course, we must also address long-festering issues as well, such as racial equality, economic inequality, crime, immigration, etc. But if we don’t fix the fundamentals, anything else will become irrelevant. In particular, we need to end legalized bribery (a/k/a unlimited campaign contributions), gerrymandering, the filibuster, assure ease of voting, and assure a fair and accurate count of votes. And, going further, we need to re-think the public space, which is now more virtual than physical, and consider how voices can be heard. We need to move away from rule by plebiscites and opinion polls to a greater sense of a shared dialogue and decision-making. But these are institutional and procedural changes that we need to make to avoid an authoritarian regime led by an unholy alliance of demagogues and venal elites. But we also need to go further upstream.
Going further upstream is what the Institute for Cultural Evolution and the Post-Progressive Alliance are about at present. (I hope I have that right!) In short, I’m not sure any improvements to our governing institutions and procedures will be worth a tinker’s dam unless we come to grips with the pair of fraternal twins that haunt humanity: fear and anxiety; anger and ressentiment. These plagues upon our psyches, as collectively and individually, underlie much of the popular discontent we now witness. I suspect that these demonic twins are a part of the background noise of individuals and societies throughout human history, but sometimes they burst into the mind with the screech of a home fire alarm, overwhelming the mind and distorting thought. I believe our world is in the midst of such an outburst. The human herd is spooked by it.
And why shouldn’t we be spooked? We know the dire predictions we face with climate change, protestations of denial or fantasies of easy-outs notwithstanding. (You’re right, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.) We’ve seen our financial system collapse (again, for the oldest among us). And while many prosper in our economy, all too many Americans have suffered mightily. Life expectancies within some groups of Americans have declined, their deaths the result of declining communities and the entailing despair these declines generate. And, of course, their despair is spurred (“treated”) by drug pushers in the guise of physicians and drug companies. We’ve suffered failed forever wars and are now looking at the prospect of war in Europe (again) and perhaps (again) in the Pacific. We’ve experienced a pandemic disease that we mishandled and by our mishandling we’ve morphed it into an endemic disease—a forever disease to go with forever wars. We’ve suffered terrorist attacks on commercial, political, and military institutions by atavistic martyrs from abroad. But with greater regularity and consequence, we experience terrorist attacks on churches, synagogues, and schools (and elsewhere) by domestic terrorists—fellow Americans—who act alone and at random. We allow these terrorists to arm because we foster a culture of paranoia and a cult of gun worship. Our idolatry about guns (“Second Amendment rights”) worships a Moloch that requires the sacrifice of random human victims. We see the Capitol building sacked by barbarians at the behest of a demagogue and his henchmen (and women). The U.S. has the mightiest military ever, and we were once a beacon of freedom, hope, and security to the rest of the world. Yet on January 6, our republic was laid prostrate before the barbarians (loosely organized by the outgoing administration) as they attacked our Congress as it went through the ritual procedures of establishing the legitimacy of the newly elected government. No living persons had witnessed this kind of attack on our Constitution. And do we continue to live under the threat of nuclear Armageddon? Yes, we simply choose to believe (evidence suggesting the contrary notwithstanding) that no leader will want to trigger a nuclear Götterdämmerung. Finally, while we enjoy unprecedented economic wealth and abundance, we also know that many of us face a future where many human workers will become redundant, unneeded. Our society has increasingly realized the role of the sorcerer’s apprentice, deploying our technologies willy-nilly with little control over their courses and consequences. Fears of automation and increasing human irrelevance have led to cries of alarm for a couple of centuries, but even the boy who cried wolf eventually encountered a wolf.
Whether we will experience any of these nightmare scenarios (and untold others), we cannot know. The future is never what it used to be. But we do know that climate change is happening now, before our eyes. We are en media res. The only remaining questions are how bad will it get (all our best efforts notwithstanding), and how effectively—peacefully, efficiently—will we make the transition to a new energy regime. A new energy regime will certainly alter our culture, economy, and politics in significant ways. I, for one, from my comfortable middle-class life, hope that the transition proves smooth and peaceful. But the longer we wait, the more likely that radical, abrupt changes will occur, even if unbidden. Each day that passes increases the risk of greater disruption; greater disruption in our climate, our society, our economics, and our politics. Some of that disruption could pave the way for a better world, but that’s a long-shot wager. Humans don’t make wise decisions when motivated by fear, anxiety, anger, and ressentiment. Current trends in our world are toward the atavistic, the authoritarian. Our advancing technologies, without the wisest guidance, are as likely to enslave us as to liberate us. We can still—I think, I hope—steer our great ship away toward a safe harbor, but time is running out. Our ship, our nation, our world, cannot turn quickly. We cannot put on the brakes—a ship has no brakes, only more or less momentum. Our size and momentum allow only for gradual turns. We cannot zigzag like a speed boat. We must seek safe harbor before we take we suffer irreparable damage.
So how do we do this? How do we make the changes, the deep changes, that are required of us? How do we persuade people to invest in creating a livable future? How do we disarm the fear, anxiety, anger, and resentment? How do we curb the greed, indolence, and indifference among the elites?
I don’t know. Like most of life’s great problems and challenges, there is no single answer. Only possible answers, tentative answers, best bets. For me, for all of us, the evidence of the reality of climate change is beyond a reasonable doubt. A failure to act on our part would constitute a criminal act; an act done intentionally, with malice aforethought. We are beyond negligence in this case; ignorance of the risk and its likely consequences isn’t an available defense. We have no justification for inaction. But what then is our remedy? What judgment should we render? Here we can only act, test, and revise.
At the present, no remedy should be off the table. Quickly taper fossil fuel use, of course. Put a price on carbon with a dividend of the proceeds paid to everyone to prevent an undue burden on low and middle-income families. Pursue nuclear power innovations. Consider geoengineering and carbon sequestration. (I’m skeptical, but pursue them.) Use the market as well as the political sphere. Consider a new ethic for a new era that will likely have less abundant energy than we’ve experienced in our lifetimes. How can we fairly and efficiently distribute what will likely prove a less abundant resource (energy)? Again, we’ll need not only to pursue technological innovations, but also innovations in our culture, our economy and economic thinking, and in our ethics and politics, our practices and institutions.
It is possible, just possible, that we—humanity—and this Earth, this oasis of life with which we are entrusted, might just come out on the other side of this crisis with a better world. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth the effort. But we need to start now. Right now.
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