Climate alarmism has been popular on the left for a while already. I consider it more than likely that climate change (formerly known as global warming) is anthropogenic and that it will induce geopolitical tensions, indeed already has. It is certainly facile to sit in the developed world and express a lack of concern on the subject. Yet I think it is very far from being about to wipe out all life on Earth. The sense on the liberal left of an impending collapse, which has an almost limitless list of historical precedents, and familiar psychological determinants, seems to fuse indistinctly various issues and different levels of concern. It is all one gigantic hotchpotch of misapplied systems theory, chronic pessimism and internalized self-hate. It gets some things right, but what it gets wrong results in a misdiagnosis which nullifies any effort to address the problem. This misdiagnosis satisfies certain psychological needs on the part of its purveyors, but results in very dysfunctional policy responses, incapable of making the problem anything other than worse even on its own terms.
Since Covid, on what is now, arguably, the right, the dominant bogeyman is incipient totalitarian technodystopia resulting from the seeming willingness of most of humanity to be subsumed into a formless mass of ideological conformity, fed by a distorted version of the discourse of interdependence which flows from the Gaia hypothesis, an eminently magical theory falsely portrayed as new since Plato in the Timaeus already had this figured out long ago: “Thus, then, in accordance with the likely account, we must declare that this Cosmos has indeed come into existence as a living creature endowed with soul and reason [...] a living creature, one and visible, containing within itself all the living creatures which are by nature akin to itself”.
This second account I find harder to refute as it does seem to be a possible future, though not, I think, a sustainable one. Nevertheless, whilst this blog would not have the title that it has did I not believe we were headed for radical upheaval, and indeed need it, I believe that neither of these accounts correctly captures the nature or likely trajectory of civilizational collapse. Certainly, neither of them integrates some very key considerations.
It is trivially obvious, I would say, that humanity is far more likely to be wiped out by nuclear war than by a relatively limited increment in global temperatures. We also face much greater threats from destruction of ecosystems unrelated to climate change and which has been going on for hundreds, even thousands of years, mainly driven by greed and perverse incentives within the global economic system which we have built and reified, if not deified. There is every possibility also of a complete meltdown of the global financial system and world trade, though I think this would be of limited duration. I definitely agree that we should reset our relationship to the living world, but not because it is at our throats and threatening us with mass extinction.
But leaving all this to one side, what is really going on is not that we are being marshalled by forces unknown into a collectivist dystopia or that we are at the edge of an ecological precipice. Rather, we have fundamentally exhausted a cultural model, the flaws of which are subtle and manifested on all sides. Patriarchal command and control, reframed as leadership and heroism, doesn’t work in a world of overlapping tribal identities. It leads to zero-sum mindsets and negative-sum outcomes. It is looked to to solve problems which it itself has engendered (pun, if you will, intended). Self-sacrifice helps not in that it presupposes a source of authority, functionally identical to all that has gone before, for the benefit of which said sacrifice is made. It is an entirely religious frame of mind. Nor does religion itself help us: it too is far too tainted by its service to worldly powers. And mankind’s dominion over nature, falsely surmised from the Hermetic sources, which say no such thing, in a moment of civilizational euphoria, must be rejected, yet without, at least if our goal is to rescue or transform civilization, losing faith in the miracle of man himself.
We are not facing ecological, but rather cultural, collapse. Insofar as the cultural narrative of patriarchy has fed into ecological destruction and in its advanced financial form made it virtually inevitable, its collapse may buy us time in that regard, but this will be of scant comfort if what we are really trying to avert is cultural collapse itself. We cannot transition from old stories to new if all we have is breastbeating around those old stories and attempts to pour new wine into old wineskins. Along the lines of this (crediting Heather Heying for the find):
Do better towards exactly what vision of society, pray tell? This is just slave morality in a new dress, and where there is a slave there is a master, and since no master has been dethroned, that master must logically continue to be the very same patriarchal demiurge who is manipulating you, laughing at you and bent on destroying you. This is a vision for a broken spirit, addicted to Foucauldian confession, under the glare of the Panopticon. Where there is no power, there is no resistance and there is no change.
For the social reformer, the question becomes, how to lead without leading? How to fight a battle without soldiers? On patriarchy’s home turf, you will anyway lose.
But patriarchs are not the problem. It is the story of patriarchy that is the problem. We are not engaged in a dynastic war of succession. We need to tell different stories, new stories, better stories, more beautiful stories, dare I say it, more convincing stories. The architect of the future is the storyteller and the artist, united with those forces which are present and available to us in the facts of authentic spiritual experience. Indeed, it has always been so. Jesus fought no earthly battle. Nor did Copernicus. Nor did Gandhi or MLK. Yet earthly dominions could resist none of these. Their stories changed the world.
Battle must be joined, but not between human foes. We are the creators and the creatrices, and the midwife at the birth. But it is the stories themselves that go to battle. We have to break the fatal enchantment of the myth of patriarchy and replace it with tales of love and delight.
Meanwhile, I grant you, a lifeboat might come in handy.