#1: Before the Flood
Turns out civilisation has already killed you.
No Exit
For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came. (Job 3:25-26)
A person who prefers industrial domesticity to wild nature is never going to take an interest in the environment until it kills them. The minority of people unfortunate enough to have taken the disingenuous media agitation about the environment seriously, therefore, have a problem on their hands. Everyone is fucked. No one is bothered.
Existential crisis.
They watched National Geographic, kept up with nature-focused journals, protested with their peers against pipelines and plastic, signed petitions and switched up their diets, and now they’re realising they wasted their time: nothing is going to change. A disappointment this devastating is the shortest route to nihilism:
“[T]here is no goal, no answer to the question: why? What is the significance of nihilism?—That the highest values devalue themselves.”
So here we are. But all around one still hears a sickly, sentimental “Can do!”-ism. Elon Musk’s electric cars. Reforestation in India. Carbon taxes. To hear the way some of these techno-libertarians (and their ghoulish FALC counterparts) speak, you’d think it was simply a question of putting the carbon back in the ground and moving on.
Optimism: it’s enough to make you wish for the end of the world.
What went wrong? Some sort of ravenous greed on part of the ruling class, it’s often said. But it seems unfair to personally blame the capitalists. After all, they were just doing their jobs. Capital’s avatars are as concerned about the polar bears as everyone else, but look at it this way, even if they stopped, someone else would replace them. As Marx said:
“Only as personified capital is the capitalist respectable… that which in the miser is a mere idiosyncrasy is, in the capitalist, the effect of the social mechanism, of which he is but one of the wheels.”
Moral condemnation is for ruminants and slaves. Besides, it may turn out to be the case that capital’s appearance on the scene merely accelerated a process that was always inevitable.
Many won’t be ready to accept defeat and will be desperately looking for solutions. How can we fight for a future fit for human consumption? A familiar leftist meme comes to mind: ‘The CEOs who are destroying the world all have names and addresses.’ Now, we like Robespierre as much as everybody else, but capitalism doesn’t really need particular capitalists to function (that’s just what they like to tell themselves) and indulging the vulgar Marxist dream of offing the CEOs of the “100 most polluting companies” won’t achieve anything. They can be replaced, after all.
And who cares about the top 100? This whole system is killing us, even the small business owner, even you, farting methane, breathing carbon, taking up space where grass or flowers or a tree could be. There are no independent spheres of production, just as there are no independent spheres of existence. Deus sive natura. And should the world spirit usher in the global workers’ revolution tonight, establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat and the end of history, that still doesn’t mean the environment will be saved, as our leftist friends would have us believe. Get this into your skull: industrial production is destroying the biosphere. Capitalism is just the mode of organisation, not the cause. A cursory look at the environmental record of the so-called socialist state projects will make this point clear. You are trapped in your garage with the car exhaust running and, make no mistake, you will die; are you seriously going to spend your last moments worrying about class character?
Engles once asked, in a rebuke to Malthus, “what is impossible for science?” Just over 200 years after the Industrial Revolution, we have our answer. Nothing, it seems, is impossible for science. It’s our species that has its limits.
More specifically, we have successfully destroyed our ecological niche – the conditions under which our species evolved no longer exist. From one perspective, it’s a shame we’re wiping ourselves out. But that is not our perspective. That’s the elephant in the room: civilisation is not worth saving. Nobody sane seriously believes the entire planet should be sterilised to make way for more roads, more malls, more offices, more apartment blocks, more slums, more skyscrapers, more restaurants, more airports, battery farms, warehouses, factories, prisons – but this is what our continued existence as a grand industrial civilisation requires, as anyone with a sensible understanding of the problem recognises. After all, the poorly thought-out fantasies of “green” cities and “sustainable” development will never get a chance at being implemented. Neither the constraints of capital nor of nature (which, at this point, amount to the same thing) will allow it. And even if we could stabilise the climate and continue as we are (but with a few more parks to litter in!) why bother? Why cling to modernity? The drudgery of a long and dull life spent doing busy work for busy work’s sake, as the diseases of sedimentary living accumulate and the chromosomes decay. Let’s not be sentimental about this: civilisation is a stillborn god. The singularity already came and went. A couple hundred years ago an unfriendly optimiser got loose and started rolling back the body of the earth, releasing something terrible. You can hear it getting closer all the time now—as the outside turns inside out.
A simple law of nature: For you to be there, something else had to go. The greens don’t want to hear it, but the opposite is true. And besides, even if it is worth sacrificing all other life on Earth so industrial society can go on, even if indefinite progress is good and desirable, the fact is that ought implies can, and with greater levels of CO2 in the atmosphere than there have been since modern humans evolved (and the levels are climbing as you read this…) it isn’t looking good for the can.
Even if the green utopia should come to pass, with zero-carbon production and green cities and legal protections for wildlife, we’d only be decelerating the process, existing in an uneasy equilibrium with the parts of nature we find appealing while continuing to destroy every other ecosystem on the planet. There is no more normative basis for dragging out our parasitic existence than there is for accelerating collapse: intensifying production, pushing always at the absolute limit, crushing resistance wherever it comes from, spewing waste and filth into the oceans, draining the earth of groundwater, destroying the rainforests, turning the sky black. Deserts metastasise and spread like cancer; the mercury rises as the number of human-habitable zones plummets from 1000 to 10 to 1 to 0. And this is no political programme, this is happening now. Save your oughts.
A silver lining, if you must have one: with us gone, what is left of nature can, perhaps, heal—that is, proliferate and function undisturbed by civilisation. The whole world a Pripyat, a Craco. Fiat justitia, et pereat mundus.
For saying that, we might be called cynics, or nihilists, if only because these terms are widely misunderstood. And we will certainly be criticised for writing something so “depressing”, but we insist on this: nothing about the climate is worth writing if it does not do enormous violence to the optimist. We have had more than enough of the dialectical conjuring tricks. While the dream of progress has kept us sleeping, we have brought life on this planet to the brink. The least we can do is wake up and look into the abyss with open eyes.
Seeing things clearly is difficult because it does not lend validity to an all-encompassing worldview of the sort necessary for the continued stability of the political activist’s psyche. And often even those who see clearly don’t see clearly enough. Ted Kaczynski is rotting away in a maximum-security prison for the sake of an anti-technology PSA. Even now, old Kaczynski is writing anti-technology PSAs—and what good they do.
It’s embarrassing. Only the religiously faithful could think discontinuous acts of violence can do any damage to the overall functioning of the industrial system. But the fact is Kaczynski is an idealist: he believes, deep down, that things can change for the better, and he believes that people’s beliefs and ideas are what drive history onwards. This is why he proposes such an absurd solution to the problem of technological slavery:
“The kind of revolution we have in mind will not necessarily involve an armed uprising against any government. It may or may not involve physical violence, but it will not be a POLITICAL revolution. Its focus will be on technology and economics, not politics.”
The message is clear: if people could be firmly convinced that technology was bad, they would surely voluntarily end modernity and die off in the billions. The utter lack of sensible materialist analysis revealed here confirms it: despite the assertions of hand-wringing moralists, Ted Kaczynski is not insane, nor is he a fascist, he’s yet another liberal, albeit one with an atypically strong sense of justice, though regrettably channeled. Compare with the contemporary resistance to Trump, who sit around twiddling their thumbs even as the state tortures and kills asylum seekers in disease-ridden camps.
Kaczynski called for something that the society of his time found unthinkable but which has found a comfortable niche in ours: toothless, non-violent, anti-political organisations that would organise against industrial society in favour of the continued existence of “free” humanity, with nature as its ostensible good cause. Kaczynski has his heirs: but they are not the depressed eco-fascist cranks ranting about modernity from their bedrooms, nor are they the contemporary eco-extremists who replicate his tactics. Kaczynski’s heir is the modern ecologically conscious citizen, who has recognised industrial society is heading towards disaster and, hoping to transcend politics, calmly and politely seeks its end.
The Liberal Climate Denier
One day, the contemporary image of the “climate science denier” will appear as an embarrassing archaism. The charlatans and cranks who have got well-read, rational liberals grinding their teeth at night are not “deniers” of anything. Not of anything important. An Exxon-funded think tank peddling bogus research to scientific illiterates is as of much consequence to the climate as a parent telling stories about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny to their kids. A decent litmus test for liberalism is the degree to which someone would say these two things do have serious consequences.
The problem with living in a liberal democracy is people start to get the impression that everyone’s ideas matter, and that they matter very deeply (especially to the politicians and capitalists) and that they affect everyone else very personally. This is why Dawkins believes encouraging children to believe in the supernatural is harmful:
“Is it a good thing to go along with the fantasy of childhood? Or should we be fostering a spirit of scepticism? I think it’s rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism—we get enough of that anyway.”
We do get enough of that, it is true, especially from these pious atheists. Religion got its teeth in them like a tick, and in carelessly ripping out the body, they left behind the jaws. What else is a sense of morality, a superstitious belief in progress, an evangelical crusading spirit against infidelity and heresy, but religion? The fear of stupidity, or rather, of the way stupidity could pollute the “political process” and turn people away from the good cause, is a religious fear.
In some parts of the liberal milieu, this fear animates a desire for technocratic government that is mistakenly called elitist. Everybody dreams of an efficient, benevolent, despotic bureaucracy—with rational and intelligent people like themselves on the Inside where the rules are written, and everyone else on the Outside where the rules are obeyed: the Garden of Eden, the Kingdom of God.
The ecologically conscientious liberal bikes to work, sorts the recycling into paper and plastic, adheres to a vegan diet with food from the local farmer’s market, attends council meetings to protest commercial development, educates their friends on the vices of meat and dairy, volunteers at the community garden, eschews excessive packaging, and in all things, does what they can.
Who hasn't heard this refrain? ‘We all need to do what we can. Please do what you can. We can all do something. I know I’m privileged that I can do this and that, so don't worry that I can do more than you, please just do what you can…’
The “climate science denier” has an excuse—they may or may not believe in the climate, they just don’t believe anthropogenic activity has any impact on it. The Liberal Climate Denier denies the existence of a climate altogether. Yes, they read the science (sometimes they even manage to read an actual primary source) and they may even think things are quite serious. But they simply don’t believe such a thing as a climate exists. They believe instead in a sort of weather-generating mystery box, one that plays by simple, ethically straightforward rules, such that it's never too late as long as we all do what we can.
Optimist psychology abhors reality: the climate is a complex system of feedback loops, delicate ecological balancing acts, energy flows, temperature gradients, reproductive and productive systems, habitats and niches, in which a small change in surface albedo can make or break an evolutionary chain. Even Ben Shapiro knows this:
“When you’re discussing global warming, for example, the proper question is not whether man is causing global warming. The question is whether man can fix global warming—a question to which the universally acknowledged answer is essentially no, unless we are willing to revert to the pre-industrial age.”
A sort of perverse Aristotelianism has got these liberals convinced there's a golden mean between polluting the Earth too much and polluting it too little. And a sincere religiosity has got them convinced there’s always a redemption available, always a second chance for those who try.
“Cosmic horror” refers to the stomach-twisting feeling of insignificance in the face of an incomprehensible and indifferent universe, but this is missing the trees for the forest. We need not go as far as the cosmos. The Earth itself is incomprehensible and indifferent, strange and unaccountable to our moral intuitions.
To cope, the liberal eco-activist has to stay busy—has to do something. But reducing our waste, decreasing emissions—this is slowing the rate of our contribution to the process, not stopping it. The damage is done, and won’t be undone by carbon offsetting and bike to work schemes. Neither able to truly fight back against the system that is killing them nor able to make peace with their conscience in complacency, the Liberal Climate Denier has to deny the climate exists, because the alternative is recognising it does.
Eyes closed as the world burns. Such awful sights tend to immolate the seer.