Having ended
my review
of Vitruvius with a link to Guy McPherson’s Climate-change
summary and update, where he explains his Near-Term Extinction (NTE) idea,
it seems worthwhile to explore the matter more fully lest my readers conclude
that I’m endorsing this particular brand of doomerism. For those who learned about NTE and now find
themselves filled with any sort of strong emotional reaction, read this.
Feel better?
I’m not
going to discuss the merits of one case against the other, as I don’t have the
time, inclination, or expertise to follow up on all the claims and references. I
don’t know if McPherson is right or wrong or partially both right and wrong. In
fact, despite inflammatory rhetoric and cherry-picked and debatable ‘facts’ on
both sides, nobody knows the fate of
the world for the next week, much less the next few decades. I rather hope he’s
completely wrong, but the scenarios he lays out seem at least somewhat plausible.
Instead of assessing whether or not we should believe in NTE, I want explore how
it can be a useful idea irrespective of whether or not it’s true, how just
considering it improves your humanity, and how people come to consider ideas
dangerous.
Our present
society seems obsessed with knowing only one story, or rather, determining the
One True Story, which, as John Michael Greer points out in one of his early
blog posts, is a deadly mistake. There may well be some sort of absolute
truth to things, but we’ll never know it with any kind of absolute certainty.
Science doesn’t work that way, but proceeds by induction, with each new
measurement having the potential to reverse long established principles. As a
consequence, science can never be completed. The data can never be fully collected;
experiments are never finished and scientific knowledge never finally settled.
Having only one hypothesis invites confirmation bias. Commitment to only one
possible future leaves you vulnerable to the near certainty that you’ll get the
future you don’t expect.
Human
extinction as an abstract concept is easy enough; all species, as far as we
know, go extinct. But it’s different to imagine witnessing the extinction and
being part of it. Apocalypse stories are as old as history, likely because our
species has lived through a few major global catastrophes, such as post-ice-age
flooding with rising sea levels and some serious volcanic eruptions, but we did
survive and there are always survivors in our narratives. Even in the event of
all-out nuclear war or a comet impact we imagine people living as long as
necessary in underground bunkers. NTE adds a new story, one where not only do
we have complete die-off, but it happens in our lifetime, and it’s our fault.
John Michael
Greer dismisses NTE (as he must to fit his own
story)
as another example of apocalyptic narrative like every other failed prediction
before it. As he sees it, NTE is an excuse to give up and do nothing, mocking
McPherson as peddling “dispairoin” in contrast to McPherson’s detraction of his
critics’ “hopium” peddling. As much as Greer’s ideas have and continue to
influence my own, far more than McPherson ever could, it seems disingenuous to
take the possibility of NTE off the table. The failure of apocalyptic fantasies
to manifest does not preclude their possibilities, though they may remain next
to nil. Greer seems committed to assuming all ideas reduce to their underlying
narratives, which is of course true, but the question remains if the narratives
accurately describe reality or not. The answer to that question can only be
ascertained after the fact, and by then we will have deluded ourselves into
thinking that the narratives were obvious, or else (as Nassim Taleb points out)
will have constructed new stories so that we can think that they were obvious.
Yet, if NTE is true, then no one will be left to speculate about it.
Memento mori,
Latin for “remember death”, was a phrase whispered in the ear of a conquering
Roman general to remind him that for all his present glory, he too will die,
and thus should retain some measure of humility. And so must we all. The
importance of the contemplation of our mortality is currently quite unpopular
in modern industrial societies. The delusion of immortality, once recognized as
a common youthful mistake, now feeds the imaginations of wishful technologists
who dream of robot bodies housing their uploaded minds in a synthetic utopia,
ironically unaware that their fantasies differ in no appreciable way from the fundamentalist
Christian rapture or the salvation of humanity by beneficent aliens. Those
technologists with less implausible dreams than an immanent super-AI that
solves all our problems are working on things like treating aging as a disease,
or nanotech that repairs our cells like so many miniature surgeons. These
approaches make quite a few spurious assumptions, like using machine metaphors
for organisms, or thinking robots small enough to pass through cell membranes
can’t possibly do something unexpectedly harmful. Besides, the ability to
imagine something does not mean that it exists, or can exist, or should exist.
Even if the technology to accomplish these feats were not about to become
economically infeasible in short order, or if they could be free of the unforeseen,
and often horrific, consequences that accompany almost all of our technological
“advances”, there is no reason at all to think that an end to death would be a
desirable state of affairs.
Death gives
life meaning, and without it we would cease to be human. The problems resulting
from overpopulation are already scheduled to result in huge complications and
likely mass die-off. Evolution proceeds by the death of older generations
freeing up resources for the younger ones; science (and culture generally)
proceeds in the same way. As Max
Plank said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its
opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” The
end of death, even were it possible, would mean the end of meaningful life and the
end of any sense of progress, however dubious that concept may be. Thus, those
who seek physical immortality are profoundly anti-human, and anti-life. “Afterlife”
and “after-death” are, after all, semantically identical; life and death are
sides of a coin. To oppose one is to oppose the other.
The
contemplation of mortality, however, enriches life by forcing decisions and
value judgments about what to do with the time we have. Far too many humans
waste precious years doing (and not doing) things they will regret
on their deathbeds. The cultural fantasy of perpetual youth reinforces the
problem and yields middle-aged adults unprepared for the right-side of the
curve of a lifetime, with the attending psychological crises now common
phenomena. Greer and others, such as Jared
Diamond, have argued that the same process plays out in civilizations that
fail to consider that their lifetimes mirror those of individuals.
Meditations
upon corpses are an integral part of traditional Buddhist practice; the
idea there being to provoke disgust with physicality and thus motivate striving
for the alleged permanence of nirvana, with the resulting acceptance of
mortality from this seen as side-effect. The philosophical obsession with the
impermanence of material forms has a long history in the West as well, starting
with Buddha’s contemporary Pythagoras (and likely before him), on through
Platonism and Neoplatonism and eventually Christianity. Western philosophy
contrasts the physical world with the spiritual world, a dualistic system of
binaries including evil-changing-multiplicity versus good-unchanging-unity.
These types of worldview seem to be born of harsh times, when escape from the
toils of physical life becomes the only reasonable concept of salvation. There
is reason to believe that it was not always this way, and that the emerging
religious sensibility of our age is reversing the metaphors. Greer refers to
this fear of physical life as “biophobia”,
a world-hating anti-cosmic ideology characterized by escapist afterlife
fantasies and a denigration of matter that contaminates the thinking even of
some modern non-religious people with obsessive concern about sterile
environments and ‘pure’ substances. It remains to be seen if the relative
comfort of modern life that possibly gives rise to the non-biophobic,
life-affirming, world-loving attitudes will survive the crushing depression
that the age of limits is set to impose.
And yet, the
concept of NTE adds something new. It’s not hard to imagine your own death, or
even some far-off abstract extinction of all life on Earth by the Sun’s red-giant
phase enveloping the Earth’s orbit, but the death of our entire species within
our lifetimes seems unprecedented. The worst visions of environmentalists,
involving things like the cutting down of the last tree or the melting of all
ice, rarely assert human extinction, and if they do it’s imagined as a problem
our grandchildren or more distant descendants might face. Seriously thinking
about personally witnessing a good part of our species’ extinction (up until
your own time comes) lends a visceral urgency to the meditation, something not
dealt with in religion or philosophy thus far.
By considering the possibility of NTE, even those self-interested people
who consider it okay to sacrifice future generations for a few more years of
opulent industrial lifestyles (a position fairly characterized as evil) must conclude
that they too have skin
in the game.
As an idea,
NTE therefore has the potential to increase empathy, though not necessarily.
McPherson certainly thinks that it does, as he advocates that we collectively
go through a grieving process and treat the living creatures of Earth,
including ourselves, as if in hospice. He recommends that people adopt a simple
environmentally-friendly lifestyle and try to be kind and generous with each
other, because no one is going to survive and the best we can do is minimize
suffering as we go down. Initially, he thought (along the lines of Derrick
Jensen’s “Endgame”)
that bringing down industrial civilization within a couple years could
conceivably slow down the positive feedback loops enough to allow some species,
maybe even some of us, to survive. But recently he’s considered the potential
impacts of the 400+ nuclear reactors which must be continually fueled with
electricity lest they go into meltdown, and also of global dimming – the
phenomenon of air pollution actually lowering the atmospheric temperature by a
couple degrees that was discovered when airline traffic was grounded for a few
days after the events of September 11, 2001. So it appears that the sudden
collapse of industrial civilization would result in NTE by different means.
Greer
critiques NTE by suggesting that believing there is no hope will lead people to
give up, do nothing, and continue to live their current lifestyles, even though
this is neither what McPherson advocates nor how he lives. In fact, the
lifestyles of Greer and McPherson are rather similar, with the exception that
Greer refuses to drive or fly and insists that McPherson’s continued flights
around the country to give presentations demonstrate bad faith on the part of
the environmental movement. This is because Greer believes in Gandhi’s
admonishment to “be the change that you wish to see in the world” – an idea
that radical environmentalists like McPherson and Jensen explicitly reject by
framing environmentalist action not as a popularity contest to win minds, but
as a war to be won by force, political or otherwise. McPherson argues
(correctly) that the planes will fly whether or not he is in them, nor should
he to be viewed as a role model. Although McPherson believes humans are
finished, he still associates with radical environmentalism in a bid to spare
some fraction of other species.
For his
part, Greer also recommends a grieving process, but for industrial civilization
rather than humanity. Both men anticipate huge effects from both peak oil and global
warming including the end of industrial civilization and massive die-off of
humans and many other species; their predictions differ only in magnitude
rather than kind. Greer’s rejection of NTE appears to be based solely upon its
similarity to other apocalyptic narratives, despite these almost never
involving total extinction and ignoring the geological fact that extinction-level
events can and do happen, as well as the assumption that people will respond to
NTE by not changing anything. However, people who accept NTE do not seem to be
continuing life as usual, but making radical changes, sometimes going off-grid,
taking up organic gardening, and caring for each other in a more profound way
than they did before, all of which I presume Greer would find agreeable.
Of course,
it’s conceivable that some people may do nothing, or worse, go on a hedonistic
polluting binge having given up all hope for the future, but we should not
judge ideas by how a psychopathic minority might react to them. If a majority
were to respond in this manner, it would be fair to say that NTE is a dangerous
idea. But then, the belief in progress that got us into this mess in the first
place is then definitely a more dangerous idea. But can an idea really be
dangerous? From the perspective of an industrialist, if everyone went back to
living off the land and quit their jobs, industry would be ruined, and
therefore voluntary simplicity would be a dangerous idea. Creationists think
evolution is a dangerous idea, and evolutionists think likewise about
creationism. It would seem that “dangerous idea” is more of a rhetorical label
for a personally disagreeable position than an objectively discernible notion.
Perhaps a
better criterion can be derived if we require that “dangerous” involves some substantial
risk to society. Creationism and evolution then can’t really be dangerous, as
someone’s ideas about these things have no consequence upon anything in their
life or those of anyone else. Even telling captive school children that Jesus rode
dinosaurs or that the god of monotheism doesn’t exist can’t be considered
serious harm in any real sense, as other ideas can readily compete with them.
These are merely ideas, we would say, leading to no appreciable harm. It may,
in fact, be more harmful (but only on a mental level) to remain sheltered from
a wide range of competing ideas, which would inhibit the mechanism of memetic
cultural evolution, lead to shallow belief systems, and undermine the basic project
of philosophy.
The idea
that owning people as property is morally acceptable is now widely considered an
evil and dangerous idea. Yet slavers argued for a long time that abolition was a
dangerous idea threatening the economy and social order of the day. Some people
may consider the argument that the abolition of slavery had more to do with the
industrial revolution than the progression of moral conscience a dangerous
idea, as it’s then easy to imagine slavery returning as industrialism runs out
of fuel. Regardless of its implications, if true, it would be a costly mistake
to ignore it, especially for those at risk of enslavement (which is highly
doubtful to fall along racial lines). So even in this case, the dangerousness
of the ideas is relative to the moral reasoning of individuals.
Heresy as a
taboo has been with us as long as monotheism. Ancient pagan thought and
philosophy, being naturally diverse, used the term to mean simply “choice”, “opinion”,
or “school of thought” and it was the task of educators to provide numerous ‘heresies’
for consideration and debate. Monotheism turned the word into the pejorative we
know today. Thus, we can now have scientific heresies, with certain ideas
considered too dangerous for research due to political correctness or for their
potential consequences. Steven Pinker wrote an essay called “In
Defense of Dangerous Ideas” as the preface to the collection of such ideas
in “What
Is Your Dangerous Idea?”. Pinker’s essay is worth reading, as he covers the
topic more thoroughly than I can here. Although his concern is with scientific inquiries
that violate social taboos, such as racial and gender differences, rather than
the more obviously harmful ideas of weapons research or things like the
insertion of “terminator” genes into food crops. The very concept of dangerous ideas is thus
fraught with complications and looks like a philosophical quagmire.
Which gets
us back to NTE. From Greer’s perspective, NTE is a dangerous idea because it
has the potential to lead to inaction when he believes certain actions will be
helpful in cushioning the coming crises. From McPherson’s perspective, Greer’s theory
of catabolic collapse is a dangerous idea because it gives people false hope
when he thinks their time would be better spent psychologically preparing themselves
for the inevitable extinction. From the perspectives of peak oil and climate
change denialists, both Greer and McPherson are spreading dangerous ideas that
threaten the economy and the social order of our day. Who is right and who is
wrong? Does it matter?
I contend
that it doesn’t matter who is correct about these differing predictions.
Failure to consider any one of them leaves us less capable of recognizing the
signs of whichever one does eventually develop. There are always many possible
worlds with many alternatives, and the ones that history will finally settle on
can’t be known until after they occur. Having multiple stories keeps us
flexible. The rhetorical hammer of ‘dangerous ideas’ is itself a dangerous idea
used to shut down consideration of different theories.
The one
thing we can be certain of is that we are all going to die. (Contrary to the
aphorism, taxes are not certain.) Whether we all die collectively in a mass
extinction is uncertain, but taking the possibility off the table is a mistake,
as is regarding it as a forgone conclusion. We live in a world composed of ever-changing
probabilities of various degrees, making convictions of certainty a terrible
vice.
This discussion of dangerous ideas developed
from my reading of Peter J. Carroll’s latest book which concludes with a
grimoire for obtaining alien knowledge that poses inherent dangers to our
sanity. This struck me as interesting, as I had not before considered any ideas
to be actually dangerous. Therefore, although I’ve merely touched upon it thus
far, for my next post I will write more explicitly about magick as I review
Carroll’s “The EPOCH”.
