Roy Scranton served in the Army for four years (2002-2006), is now a doctoral candidate in English at Princeton, and, in October, published a book called Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. He just reprised his thesis in the philosophy column “The Stone” at the New York Times in a piece with a similar title: “Learning how to die in the Anthropocene,”
Scranton’s views—that humans and our civilization are bloody well doomed by climate change, and so we should turn to philosophy to help accept our inevitable demise—were apparently formed when he was soldiering in Iraq. Deciding his death was inevitable, he found solace in a philosophical resignation:
I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure,” which commanded: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I’d imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive. “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead,” wrote Tsunetomo, “he gains freedom in the Way.”
I got through my tour in Iraq one day at a time, meditating each morning on my inevitable end. When I left Iraq and came back stateside, I thought I’d left that future behind. Then I saw it come home in the chaos that was unleashed after Katrina hit New Orleans. And then I saw it again when Sandy battered New York and New Jersey: Government agencies failed to move quickly enough, and volunteer groups like Team Rubicon had to step in to manage disaster relief.
Now, when I look into our future — into the Anthropocene — I see water rising up to wash out lower Manhattan. I see food riots, hurricanes, and climate refugees. I see 82nd Airborne soldiers shooting looters. I see grid failure, wrecked harbors, Fukushima waste, and plagues. I see Baghdad. I see the Rockaways. I see a strange, precarious world.
In other words, he sees what he calls an “apocalyptic future,” a future that cannot be changed, no matter what we do. We’ve reached the point of no return, for, if overpopulation doesn’t get us, climate change will. The “Anthropocene”—the era in which human activity dominates the planet—will come to an end when our species is hoist by its own petard.
Scranton gives a long list of people who have predicted our coming doom. Those include Paul Ehrlich, whose Population Bomb, published in 1968, predicted imminent disaster: worldwide famines due to overpopulation that would begin in the 1970s and devastate our species within two decades. Ehrlich was dead wrong: the Green Revolution, reduction in population growth, and improvements in well being, health, and nutrition have shown his predictions to be grossly inaccurate. And his predictions were wrong precisely because rationality and science were brought to bear on the problems.
Scranton, however, raises a similar apocalyptic scenario, and also denies that anything can ameliorate our dire future (my emphasis):
The challenge the Anthropocene poses is a challenge not just to national security, to food and energy markets, or to our “way of life” — though these challenges are all real, profound, and inescapable. The greatest challenge the Anthropocene poses may be to our sense of what it means to be human. Within 100 years — within three to five generations — we will face average temperatures 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today, rising seas at least three to 10 feet higher, and worldwide shifts in crop belts, growing seasons and population centers. Within a thousand years, unless we stop emitting greenhouse gases wholesale right now, humans will be living in a climate the Earth hasn’t seen since the Pliocene, three million years ago, when oceans were 75 feet higher than they are today. We face the imminent collapse of the agricultural, shipping and energy networks upon which the global economy depends, a large-scale die-off in the biosphere that’s already well on its way, and our own possible extinction. If homo sapiens [sic: where is the editor?] (or some genetically modified variant) survives the next millenniums, it will be survival in a world unrecognizably different from the one we have inhabited.
Well, he’s right to call attention to climate change, the most pressing problem humanity is facing. But why is it a challenge not to science, public policy, or human ingenuity, but to “our sense of what it means to be human”? What Scranton apparently means baffles me, but he does lay it out, and it’s connected with how we come to terms with our demise—not by the Sun’s expansion in 5 billion years, but by climate change, and within centuries. We must, he argues, turn not to science or rational solutions, but to philosophy:
But the biggest problems the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the root of humanistic and philosophical questioning: “What does it mean to be human?” and “What does it mean to live?” In the epoch of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality — “What does my life mean in the face of death?” — is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination. What does human existence mean against 100,000 years of climate change? What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end?
These questions have no logical or empirical answers. They are philosophical problems par excellence.
Yes, and those questions have no answer. Really, “What does it mean to be human”?? There are a gazillion ways to answer that question, or to find ways to live your life, but none of them are going to help humans “make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end.” And make no mistake: he sees our end as inevitable, and sooner rather than later:
The biggest problem climate change poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.
Nothing we can do to save ourselves. This is the same litany that Ehrlich and other doom-sayers have been singing for centuries; such predictions aren’t new. And all they do is tell us to do nothing: to give up climate-change talks and solutions, and wring our hands as we turn to philosophy.
Well, maybe Scranton is right. If you judge by the comments after his piece, his fine prose and predictions of our end struck a chord with many readers. (I have a sneaking suspicion that some of these are Christians. After all, 41% of Americans already think we’re living in the Biblical End Times, and another poll showed that 77% of evangelical Christians—attribute natural disasters to the arrival of the End Times. That belief, too, is a call to do nothing: Jesus is on his way, take no thought for the morrow, and open your Marcus Aurelius.)
But I refuse to admit that we’re doomed. We’ve heard that before, and, indeed, if we don’t do something about global warming, future generations are in for a very rough time. But if we need anything now, it’s not philosophy but rationality, political will, recognition of the science that tells us we’re in trouble, and then the application of science (including demography) to the problem.
Maybe that science won’t work. Maybe we are doomed. But we’ve heard laments like Scranton’s before, and they’ve all been wrong. Maybe this one is wrong as well. But one thing is for sure: the only way to prove Scranton wrong is to reject his claim that there’s nothing we can do to help ourselves. Rage, rage against the heating of the Earth.
Ultimately his perspective is lazy, IMO. He simply grants himself a pass on trying to do something to prevent disaster by declaring the struggle over. I can think of nothing less valuable than wallowing in philosophical defeat.
Lazy is a bit harsh. I imagine he worked quite hard to arrive at his determination to think of himself as already dead. That’s not easy to do.
I think his problem is one that we all face… can I generalize my personal experience to the human condition? What he describes is a valid point of view in a warrior culture. What he forgets is that not everyone is a warrior, or needs to be, so that particular point of view is not one that everyone should adopt. You see the same problem when talking to police. From their point of view, the world’s a dangerous place. And given their daily experiences that is somewhat justified. But we are not all police. We don’t all have to confront crime and death on a daily basis.
It is not the “human condition” to be a U.S. soldier in Iraq. That is his particular experience, and one we should work to eliminate. Generally, we would prefer the human condition to be that of residing in a secure and friendly community. We can learn something from the extreme deviations from that, but what we can learn is not “everyone should live as a warrior”.
He states quite plainly that adopting the “already dead” point of view freed him to think about doing his best to keep others alive. That’s not doing nothing. I take what he is saying as an admonition to not let fear and anxiety paralyze you. I do not read him as saying do nothing.
You are right. I was overly harsh.
I don’t think you were overly harsh. Although I accept all the points Jamie makes, I still see this as a form of laziness. Intellectual laziness. This guy, imo, is just giving up because he sees it as too hard.
The fact is there are little things everyone can do to ameliorate the effects of anthropogenic climate change every day. Individually our efforts may seem like nothing, but collectively they make a difference.
And science can help. It developed crops that produce more with less water and poorer soil. It gave us hairspray without CFCs. It’s developed vehicles that produce lower emissions.
His approach may have worked for him on the field of battle where potentially death really was imminent. (Though there are other ways to get through such situations without deciding you’re already dead.) Science has given us a warning about climate change, has given us ways to help, and is working on many more. There’s no need to give up, and in this situation his attitude is entirely defeatist imo.
I am deeply pessimistic about the survival of Homo sapiens. But I have not burdened my children and grandchildren with my pessimism. Nor would I. Simply having descendants and living within a community are sufficient to make me care and do: and science administered through a strong political will gives future generations the best chance.
I interpreted GBJames’ use of lazy as the correct term. Not in the way it relates to the amount of work Scranton put in to arrive at his conclusions, but in that this is an easy answer.
It is simple (the easy way out) to conclude it is time to give up. It is very hard to continue to struggle to change the way things are, to try to improve them and prevent our demise. Overcoming the inertia of an individual perspective that “it’s not my problem” attitude or worse, the indifference the seems to dominate, is a long process.
The defeatist attitude of Scranton needs to be challenged. Calling his work lazy isn’t harsh, it is a warranted challenge to his way of thinking.
Agreed. Lazy is exactly the right word. Also unimaginative and pessimistic, in the worst leaning-on-the-scale sense.
He is a depressed person telling other depressed people to embrace suicide rather than seek treatment.
I don’t know anything about this person other than this article so I am unsure if I understand his position well enough but, provisionally, based on just this, I agree with you.
I don’t mean he’s literally a depressed person (though, of course he might be). I mean that his position is similar, that he stands in the relation to the rest of us in a similar way… that we should view the outlook he’s espousing here with the same skepticism we would if a depressed person stood in front of an audience of depressed people and said, “There is no hope, kill yourselves.”
i feel like it comes off as if he’s severely depressed. other than the off putting certainty of his comments, this reads like someone that has no idea what to do other than to give up.
I know it’s mean, but I think the best description of this guy is “drama queen”.
Whether through depression, perhaps PTSD, or just general existential angst, it seems to me that he lacks insight into his own emotional state and how it’s influencing his view of the world. I’m sympathetic with his struggles if he has emotional problems. But I don’t have a lot of time on an intellectual level for people who mistake their subjective emotional states for profound insight. It’s an adult extension of the angsty teenager who thinks he’s the first person ever to feeeeel things so deeply.
If you’re angry, sad and self-absorbed, you need to be a hugely talented artist or musician, or I’m not really interested.
One of my major issues with global warming or climate change hype is the idea that the Earth is going to change in ways that mean the end for humans. I don’t think that is possible. Humans have showed an amazing ability to create spaces for themselves from the frozen north to the Arabian deserts to islands to mountains and everywhere in between. Scranton’s statement that the world will be “unrecognizably different” is pure hyperbole. Not only is the idea that we must commit ourselves to fatalism a stupid way to approach the problem, it isn’t our nature.
That caught my eye right away. Climate change is not going to be easy to mitigate or cope with, but worst case scenarios are not going to make a reasonable basis for decision making over the next 50 or 100 years. Resignation is understood to be simply unacceptable, whatever the ultimate penalties and damages would result from complete inaction. There will be attempts at mitigation and they may be deemed pretty successful. If not, humans will muddle through until culture and technology catch up. But total failure isn’t a reasonable starting point.
There will certainly be change that is more rapid than the norm, and that will cause hardships and major upheavals. Catastrophes even. But it will happen over generations. Humanity will very likely survive just fine. We can adapt at that rate.
The issues are that it will cause many more extinctions and the human death toll that would otherwise not occur would be large. And losses of economic, historical and cultural significance would be large. All of that is more than enough to warrant a major worldwide effort to avoid or mitigate anthropogenic global warming as best as we can. But extinction of Homo sapiens? Not very likely.
I think this guy needs to read the IPCC AR5 reports. They will give him a more realistic understanding of what the various climate scenarios are rather than reading Greenpeace, WWF and EDF brochures intended to procure donations by frightening the heck out of gullible people. But then he might need some science knowledge – I see he is from the English department; certainly philosophy isn’t going to help, they’ve been working on some problems for about 2500 years and haven’t found answers yet!
Climate change will do as all change does, bring disaster to some, and benefits to others. Florida, and many islands, are doomed, but Canada is very likely to benefit considerably, unless you’re a Canadian polar bear. The poor will, as always, suffer the worst, and the wealthy the least. But humanity certainly won’t die out. The only climate event that would threaten that is another “Snowball Earth”, which is hardly on the cards at the moment. The part of Australia in which I live, the south east, will suffer greatly and in fact is already suffering. We are regularly having record breaking weather events, and we have to face up to the fact that the future is hotter and drier than the past; never a good thing on the only continent without a major river system. But we won’t all die.
Jeez, I gotta start playing more first-person-shooter games 🙁
I agree with DrBrydon that, even given extreme climate change and the inevitable effects it will have on humans, and life generally, it won’t actually extinguish all life or even all human life. Things will change, but at least we are now starting to face up to reality.
I find it slightly paradoxical, when Jerry refers to Christians rather liking the idea that we live in the end times. Since climate change was first identified as a challenge Christians have been in denial over the matter, and many still are. Yet now they see it as the apocalyptic future they so desire, they are jumping on the bandwagon. Talk about having it both ways!
My impression for some time has been that they are in cognitive dissonance about the matter. On the one hand, all of this crap that is coming is the end-times, so get right with the Lord. On the other hand, all of this crap that is claimed to be coming will not happen b/c the Lord promised the world would never flood again.
Christians are a bit confused about what they want. I remember many Christians claiming that Obama might be the anti-Christ but they seemed to think this was a reason not to vote for him. They should have welcomed the anti-Christ as president because this would have clearly signaled the beginning of the ‘end-times’
Of course they’re confused. Many of them believe in a version of the religion where the clearly most effective existential choice would be mass infanticide – because definitionally sin-free babies get a free pass to heaven. Sure the people perpetrating the murders would go to hell but that would be a Christ-like sacrifice and a small price to pay for saving so many souls. I’ve actually seen people argue about this in the interwebs.
And then of course, having committed the ultimate sacrifice of accepting eternal torture to save so many babies, the murderers are rewarded with Heaven.
Bush was the anti-Christ too. Referring to the Nostradamus predictions, where the anti-Christ was sometimes referred to as Mabus, you turn the “W” over to make an “M”, keep the “a” of Walker, then add the “bus” of Bush.
Makes perfect sense. Apparently.
Obama gets picked because he’s so good at speaking, and merely by dint of being US president.
The anti-Christ was born in the Middle East in 1964, is a man (naturally), is really handsome, seems to be a unifier at first, and a compelling speaker. You can supposedly learn that from Nostradamus too.
Maybe he took over Scranton’s body to get into the US, and this is part of his plan to make everyone compliant. 🙂
Certainly mainly Christians do have a millenarian escatology, and look forward to the end of times, and the coming of Jesus. I think the reason they reject climate change here, though, is that on the right its proponents and solutions are viewed as being largely socialist and anti-capitalist.
I empathize with Scranton’s motivation. A sort of search for meaning in a world where we now understand ourselves to be not above any part of reality but entirely enclosed within it. His conclusions, however, are those of a child who has given up.
I’ll treat Scranton’s despair with the disdain it deserves. It’s pretty unlikely that human extinction is on the cards any time soon. There’s a higher probability that he is correct on the civilisation-ending front, but even that is by no means certain. Completely economically wrecking, I’m perfectly happy with – that is inevitable since unstopping growth in resource use is limited by our confinement to one planet. And that’s going to break the economy, one decade or another.
But to me, a more interesting question is, if this civilisation falls (how far back – let’s say bronze-age to iron-age border ; classical Greeco-Roman), will it be possible for another technological civilisation to arise?
Consider a re-rising civilisation. If you want more energy – all of the readily accessible coal seams and oil deposits have been drained. If you want more metals, most of the high-grade, near surface ores have been exploited. If you want to build something monumental, there are these pyramids and abandoned cities scattered all over the landscape – rather daunting.
I think it’s an open question.
If, of course, the species gets out to the rest of the solar system (my bet would be by living inside comets for the radiation shielding and reaction mass), then the species is probably secure, and to the best of our knowledge, the galaxy is ours in the next couple (revision : handful) of million years. The home planet may be fundamentally fucked by then, but leaving home behind for someone else to clean up has always been a popular tactic.
I do not see any physical problem: all (or most) of the raw materials are still there,
Just crank up recycling to 99%, and be more efficient in material use. As regards energy, the Sun is still shining.
The real problem is how to get to a sustainable future without first going through an intermediate Mad Max world phase.
… that is when keeping the present civilisation going. The question was about if this civilisation falls (defining “fall” as going back to classical Greco-Roman levels of knowledge).
At that level of technology, concentration of minerals in your ore is really, really important. For a significant part of the last two centuries, many mines have been able to make a living from re-mining the spoil heaps of Roman era mines on their surface outcrops. In convenient heaps ; not underground ; already ground up ; still has several percent of the ore that the Romans couldn’t extract ; lovely stuff.
What’s going to kill us and much of the charismatic biosphere is the set of traits evolution baked into humanity: greed and shortsightedness, which become incredibly destructive empowered by modern technologies at global scales.
I agree and the slowness to change. Sure, we can adapt to change, but we really don’t like it. I don’t agree with Scranton’s conclusions but I also don’t think that technology is going to pull our asses out of the fire. What we need, is drastic change in how we live and we are pretty unwilling to make that change so doomed it is.
I think that’s largely correct. Technology is definitely going to play a significant roll in mitigating climate change, but without the willingness to change behavior, we are screwed.
A big challenge is to persuade Americans to adopt an incremental Carbon tax. This will be difficult but I don’t think it’s impossible. It won’t happen real soon, but maybe in 5 or 10 years.
Yes, years of working in IT has taught me that the technology is the easy part – getting people to use it….that’s tricky!
I am not sure if you meant to exclude technology, but if so I disagree. There is no way out of this without either a major human die off, or technology. A slow steady drop in population due to lower birth rates would be fine, good even. Huge masses of people dying horrible deaths due to economic, political and natural disasters is something else. Continuing advancements in, and large scale applications of, technology will be necessary to avoid that.
I do agree that technology alone obviously will not be sufficient to pull our asses out of the fire. I agree we do also need to change our ways. But that alone is not sufficient either. It is going to take both, in large doses. Or Thunderdome.
The good news is that we have started to change our ways. Hopefully we can continue to do so. A major advancement would be to stop voting to high office politicians who play to the large voting minority who think that people like Sarah Palin are just swell.
Other good news is that many technologies that would be very useful in saving ourselves are in development or on the near horizon.
No, I mean technology alone. Most people think they can lay back and let the invention of some technological wonder save the day when what’s needed is for people to stop laying back. The problem isn’t going to fix itself and the short-sightedness of our species really gets in the way as does a tendency to be selfish.
Precisely why we are going to have to be happy to tax ourselves with a carbon tax. With oil and coal gradually priced up, R&D is highly incentivised and acceptance of new technologies becomes the selfish thing to do. In order to succeed we need to harness market forces worldwide.
And tax industry AND we have to make it better for people in nations where polluters get away with it. That way, a corporation can’t simply pack up and go elsewhere to avoid taxes.
They also should be charged for recycling their packaging. I think they have this in Europe….stop those cursed bubble/blister packs that just cut us anyway.
Yes, a carbon tax will have to be, eventually, world wide. You can start by taxing carbon at the well head, coal at the generator plant and all carbon imports and exports to even the playing field. Europe and China are already getting started on this. Let’s hope the Republican party becomes a minority in the congress.
One thing seems pretty clear – there are too @#$%!! many people on the planet. And even if there aren’t, do we really NEED 7B or whatever the current number is?
What possible downside is there to reducing our numbers?
What do you think would be easier to achieve: to reduce the population of the United States by 50% or to reduce the consumption level (incl. usage of dirty fuels) by 50%?
Population, over some interval. No idea how long it would take to achieve 50% at a gradual pace, tho. I have uber-leftwing friends who rail against fracking, yet their next FB post will be from some destination that required travel by jet.
“Population, over some interval”
Nope, that’s a wrong answer.
Depends on what you mean by “easier”. If it means “is technologically more feasible”, then reducing consumption level, hands down. The technology is already there. The resources for food production are already there. Sustainability is perfectly possible. Compared with the damage caused by non-sustainable mass consumption, it’s a no-brainer.
If it includes psychological and political willpower, then halving the population, hands down. The population growth rate in the Western world is generally flatlining and in some cases reversing. You could sit back and watch, and the population problem could even solve itself in a century or two.
By contrast, too many people – not just biased companies in the relevant fields, but the non-committed public en masse – collude to make global warming and climate change trickier to tackle than they should be. It hits so much of our comfortable, everyday lives, and represents such a drastic change of our high-consumption lifestyles, that frankly you’d need a psychological or sociological miracle to get any major change off the ground.
“If it includes psychological and political willpower, then halving the population, hands down. The population growth rate in the Western world is generally flatlining and in some cases reversing. You could sit back and watch, and the population problem could even solve itself in a century or two.”
NEWS FLASH: we don’t have a century or two, to address the problem of rising global temperatures and the population of the USA is expected to rise in the next 50 years.
Good luck convincing the American public (and politicians) using psychological and political willpower that the country should shrink its population by 50%.
I don’t mean to say it’s feasible. Anyone suggesting the US reduce its birth rate – and to a level where the population halves within a few decades – would almost certainly become a national pariah overnight.
But that’s a revulsion towards reproductive control en masse, and you can at least get more people to agree that overpopulation is an issue. There seem to be far more mental blocks regarding overconsumption, though, such as our lifestyles adjusting to high-consumption, denial of climate change via global warming, belief in the infallibility of technological progress, and so on. For instance, it’s no skin off the oil companies’ noses if people reduce their populations, but tell them people need to consume less oil.
If it helps, what I had in mind was the astronomical unlikelihood of persuading people to have fewer children versus the mega-hyper-ultra-astronomical unlikelihood of persuading people to turn their shopping, political, and international worldviews through a 180.
“If it helps, what I had in mind was the astronomical unlikelihood of persuading people to have fewer children versus the mega-hyper-ultra-astronomical unlikelihood of persuading people to turn their shopping, political, and international worldviews through a 180.”
Do you really think that one would have greater chance of selling the average family on the idea of population control, than convincing the family that it can live with one car instead of two? Or that it should get a zero-emission car instead of a diesel one?
Yes. To quote Monbiot on the issue:
“James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the biosphere. But I haven’t been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to address the impacts of the very rich.”
http://www.monbiot.com/2009/09/29/the-population-myth/
As that article points out, it’s much easier to pin the blame over environmental damage on overpopulation rather than overconsumption, for the simple reason the former is less politically charged. And since population control already goes on – admittedly on a lesser and more unconscious level – with women emancipation, widely available contraception, family planning, and the general trend of richer families having fewer children, it’s standing on a much easier starting point. Compare that with trying to convince a country to lessen its carbon footprint when its economy massively relies on fossil fuels.
“As that article points out, it’s much easier to pin the blame over environmental damage on overpopulation rather than overconsumption, for the simple reason the former is less politically charged.”
Population reduction measures are only less politically charged when the people contemplating them think about some brown people on a different continent, not their own backyard.
When you bring the issue to their front door, however, it changes the whole complexion of the matter. As you admitted earlier: “Anyone suggesting the US reduce its birth rate – and to a level where the population halves within a few decades – would almost certainly become a national pariah overnight.”
“Compare that with trying to convince a country to lessen its carbon footprint when its economy massively relies on fossil fuels.”
FYI: Germany, for example, is so afraid of reducing its population that it is willing to accept millions of migrants from the Middle East and Africa to make up for the declining births in the country. Therefore, it’s evident to me that Germany prefers to focus on lowering its carbon emissions without resorting to population reduction measures. And though other European nations may be more reluctant to opening their borders to mass immigration, they are similarly unwilling to reduce their populations.
Fair enough. You make good points. I can’t think of any convincing rebuttal without invoking some evidence, and I don’t have any.
I am, when it comes down to it, making nothing more robust than an anecdotal and impressionistic point, which now seems to me to be a hasty judgement. It could easily be proven wrong by the first public attitudes survey anybody did.
I know – I always thought an interesting story would be about how humans had the ability to live countless years, but they had to agree not to reproduce if they did this and how people would respond to such a choice.
I’d be all over it! After speaking with a woman, in a mobile phone shop, who was beside herself with the bill her daughter ran up, I realized I’d only murder my young. I suggested she turn off all apps that use cellular data (iPhones are notorious for defaulting these to on, including the app store) & download a nice program I use called “data manager”, she told me it wouldn’t help because her daughter wouldn’t care that she was going over.
“Not if she were my daughter” I thought as I imagined all sorts of punishments that started with being cut off from her cell phone plan & escalated from there.
I don’t know why anyone still goes with carriers that have limits on data usage and charge extra when you go over it. I’ve had a plan for several years now with unlimited everything, including data, for 4 lines for $100 a month. No hidden fees or extras, just $100 a month no matter how much data I or my little monsters use. Never had a problem with it any where I’ve been. Heck, usually I’ve got a connection when other people don’t.
Because we live in Canada and don’t have such plans and the plans we have are horribly expensive.
You mean the US can do something better than Canada? I’ve become so pessimistic of my country that I’m not sure I can believe that!
Interestingly, my plan includes Canada, Mexico and some other parts of the world as part of the regular calling area.
Our rates are horrible here. There is basically a monopoly for providers and the government keeps stopping further competition. US companies don’t want to come here because Canada doesn’t have the population to justify the cost of setting up a ginormous network across the whole country.
The only good thing I can say is the quality of the networks are pretty good. Other than that, we’re pretty much raped.
Here is a good example of how crap our mobile plans are. This is from Bell which gives you 15GB of shareable data for $100. Now, that is going to include an assload of hidden fees & 13% tax on top of it. That’s probably the closest I can find to what you have.
Most likely, this woman, who looked like a regular lady without a ton of disposable income, probably had a much lower data plan. If you go over your limit it is usually something like $5/250 mb.
I’ve seen students downloading apps over wifi at work & I’ve often thought they are rich kids with parents paying the bill.
I remember my early experience with mobile phones. My bill would average 18 pages or so and no matter how long I spent trying to decipher it I could never make sense of it. The bill was always significantly higher than what it seemed it should have been and dealing with customer service was a sure path to suicide, or murder. I hated it.
Agree with you on all points Diana.
Btw, why does your (hypothetical) daughter need an iPhone? Aside from being exorbitantly expensive to buy and run. My cellphone cost $35 and just makes phone calls and texts. Like, it’s just a phone. And it lasts 3 or 4 days between charging the batteries.
(I did have a Samsung Galaxy smartphone but my wife scored it because she liked the look of it, she doesn’t know how to use it so it spends most of its time turned off ‘in case the battery goes flat’. Sigh…)
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I suspect this lady’s daughter has an iPhone because it’s what all the kids have these days. She sounded spoiled to me. I’d have made her get a job to pay for it. I would never have expected my parents to pay for my phone or its plan.
I like my iPhone but I use it for work as well as my own use. I’m often on a portable device because it gives me access on the go.
No quibbles with that.
Personally, a cellphone (non-‘smart’) is all I want because I have a strong preference for a decent-sized screen and a proper keyboard. So I do my Internet access through a laptop.
(The Samsung S2 might get re-annexed next time I’m in Europe – for use with Googlemaps, booking.com etc – if I can find a cheap enough data plan.)
cr
Population is a long term issue. Global Warming is already well underway and threatens to get out of hand entirely. If we did everything possible starting today, I doubt you could reduce population significantly in 200 years. By that time most of NYC would be underwater.
When I hear ‘doom’ I think extinction, and Scranton suggests our extinction is a possibility but I think its extremely unlikely – at least from climate change.
I’m not sure what form a “collapse of civilization” would take. Does he mean a breakdown of our democracy? A complete breakdown of world trade? The collapse of Rome was good for some and very bad for others but I think it probably didn’t effect most peoples lives from day to day. In fact, the date we consider to mark the fall of Rome – when it was sacked – was not considered by people at the time to have that significance. So maybe the date that people a millennia from now will mark as the end of our civilization has already occurred?…or will occur shortly and wont be due entirely to climate change? The nomination of Trump? I’m only half joking in suggesting this. I think his popularity suggests something seriously wrong with our country.
I read the NYT essay (but not the book) and got a different message. Scranton is embracing the consequences of materialism for our meaning and morals. When he writes that “consciousness is reducible to the brain and our actions are determined not by will but by causes” he also denigrates the corollary that “our values and beliefs are merely rationalizations for the things we were going to do anyway.” I don’t think he’s giving in to nihilism at all. Just the opposite when he writes that “If we can stomach the moral vertigo this idea might induce [that there is no transcendent moral truth, no sky fairy, no free will, and no after-life], we can also see how it’s not necessarily nihilistic, but in the right light a testament, rather, to human resilience.” He argues that this optimistic view arises from our innate evolved biological imperative to find meaning and agency in ourselves and in the world, and he credits E. O. Wilson for this idea. He is arguing that (1) disaster is coming, and (2) a first step in avoiding disaster is to understand ourselves, reject our destructive world views (like apocalyptic Abrahamic religions), and embrace our evolved biological natures including our need for meaning. His readers might disagree about whether or not (1) is true, but I thought that (2) was good advice either way.
Instead of us turning to philosophy, it’s philosophy that should finally turn into science!
He’s just embracing the fundamental impotence of philosophy and trying to elevate that into a virtue.
I’m all in favor of philosophical reflection on what it means to be human, but two of my answers are courage and problem-solving with reason. And courage isn’t limited to accepting fate, but to changing it.
I like philosophy and (non-dualistic non-ethereal) spirituality but I want it to be rooted in reality.
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RE: “Where is the editor?” Isn’t the plural of ‘millenium’ ‘millenia’?? But I’m unsure what the problem with “homo sapiens” is.
As it’s a species name, conventional taxonomy dictates that it should be capitalized and in italics.
Read Scranton’s book and whilst it is pessimistic, I think his overall aim is to inspire our better angels.
Don’t think he expects our extinction, rather, our survival in a much changed world – possibly one in which our global civilsation as we know it is no longer around. Quite what that means is up for debate. Is it a Mad Max world? Or is it just one in which globalisation and associated movement and trade is no longer viable? I share some of his pessimism about general outcomes in that we are facing uncertain times and need to face up to our role, but agree that this shouldn’t be a reason to not attempt mitigation of climate change.
My understanding is that unless a technolgoical breakthrough which can remove Co2 from the atmosphere is devised (not impossible but to date, unachieved), we are in mitigation territory. And it’s a moral imperative we attempt to mitigate / reduce impacts.
Anyay, I took from his writing that an acceptance of the trouble we’re in with climate (and undoubtedly, in the long run, we’ve already baked in some problems including rising seas and species loss), can at least help us to not resort to violence and tribalism in tough times. Climate stoicism is how I think of it. Overall, I felt his message in the book was to remember our humanity and kindness in the face of adversity.
Ah, I think global warming is the least of our concerns. And so do most existential riskologists. At worst, climate change will be a conflict multiplier that will inflate the probability of annihilation via some other means. I’ve written about this extensively on my Institute’s website (www.risksandreligion.org), as well as in a forthcoming book. For those interested in a less climate change-centric take on the future, feel free to visit the website and comment.
I understand Scranton’s decision while in Iraq that his death was inevitable and to prepare himself mentally to accept it in advance. I made that same decision fifty years ago in Vietnam. I kept a bit of Shakespeare in my head for most of my tour: “By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will he that dies this year is quit for the next.” Now that I am old, I find that death waits patiently for me, but I still won’t have to do the fucking thing more than once.
“I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive.”
I thought this was the main (and rather poignant, I think) point. “Bad Things” are going to happen. Maybe we should consider investing more in dealing with the inevitable than trying to prevent it.
I think that is a false choice. The obvious better choice to me is to prepare for the worst and attempt to prevent the disaster. After all, what, exactly, is inevitable and is it reasonable to assign such a high likely-hood of accuracy to the verdict of “inevitable” that it doesn’t make sense to even attempt to prevent or mitigate the disaster?
The obvious answer to me on that is “no.”
A bit ago David Deutsch was discussed here in the context of explanatory power:
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_explanation?language=en
In his book The Beginning of Infinity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_of_Infinity
He makes the optimistic case the humans have always and will always develop the science and technology needed just in time.
Of course he does mention that we will have to get off this planet…
Think what you will about his philosophical conclusions but the man made the right decision in using an oxford comma here: “…captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery…”
😀
I find it bizarre to postulate that philosophy is what you invoke instead of logic and empiricism. Philosophy is supposed to be a rational enterprise. If it doesn’t answer to evidence or logical argument, are we supposed to make stuff up, or what?
As for the main points, there seem to be some bizarre leaps. It’s one thing to say climate change et al are going to give civilization a hard time, though I think apocalyptic is overselling it. It’s quite another to use it as a springboard for mass introspection. “Is already dead” is an exaggeration, and the defeatism is not only premature but given a wholly undeserved patina of respectability. It’s like hearing a doctor say, “We should admit the patients are all going to die, so let’s just rehearse the funeral”… after a barely there attempt to diagnose the problem.
I think the biggest problem with the piece – though its odd focus on Freudian thanatophobia is a close runner-up – is its dismissiveness of any kind of practicality. Even if that’s not the intention, it’s easy for several people to read it that way. Don’t change your buying habits, don’t focus on political movements, don’t even anticipate worst-case scenarios and plan accordingly. Just meditate on the subconscious fear of death, or whatever. Dismiss the outer world. Focus on the inner. Never mind that we’ve apparently spent millennia wringing our hands over “the human condition”. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
That’s denial of an intellectually pretentious sort, if not a perversion of what philosophy is ideally placed for: helping us tackle and understand problems. The solution is structurally medical, and in order of priority; to prevent the problem, to cure it if you can’t prevent it, to ameliorate it if you can’t cure it, to adjust to it if you can’t ameliorate it, to wait for its end if you can’t adjust to it, and – as a necessary and regrettable last resort – to take the problem with you if you can’t wait for its end.
Using philosophy to help with any step of that program is sensible. Using philosophy to encourage people to abandon any of those steps prematurely is tantamount to abetting the problem. I see nothing worthwhile in the latter.
Yes, it seemed to me like Scranton has been reading Cormack McCarthy’s The Road. A bit prematurely bleak, aren’t we?
Also interesting that people in the past who lived difficult lives without modern conveniences were apparently not human.
It sure sounds as if he plagiarised that first part from ‘Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai’ :
“Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears, and swords. Being carried away by surging waves. Being thrown into the midst of a great fire. Being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake. Falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease, or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day, without fail, one should consider himself as dead.”
Ah. Misread the quote. I didn’t realise he was quoting/paraphrasing Hagakure. I thought he’d just watched the Jarmusch film!
It does strike me as a bit sloppy for him to have quoted and then paraphrased with his own interpolations (from his Iraq experience). The reader can easily be left with the impression that the unquoted parts are entirely his own, which, as you point out, is not the case.
Haven’t read through the comments, so sorry if someone already posted this.
“What is that your business?”
I love that scene!
We humans have a secret weapon against the future: we can pass along the lessons we have learned through our struggles, successes, and failures to understand and adapt to our children. Standing on the shoulders of our ancestors (as we did) they will adapt and mold our environment.
I can understand how its pessimism ticks people off, but the article can perhaps serve as a valuable counterpoint to all those cornucopians who breezily assume that once we hit a limit or problem, “they will come up with something”, or “they” will just invent a self-improving artificial intelligence that will magically solve all our problems.
They here meaning some amorphous concept of science and engineering that can apparently do everything we need it to do, including things like ignoring resource constraints or doing the physically impossible.
The thing is, science has already provided the answer to the global problems we are facing with increasing urgency, and it has done so several decades ago: have less children, waste less resources, move to a zero carbon economy ASAP. People just didn’t like that answer, so they keep asking for a technological fix that won’t cost them anything.
It is that simple really. The solution is known and indeed blatantly obvious, but the will is lacking.
(And yes, Ehrlich et al. have been wrong so far. But if you are barrelling your car towards a wall at 100 km/h, the passenger begging you to stop will also be wrong all the time except for that one second that you both die. Interestingly we usually do not take that to mean that there is no wall.)
Ahh. You of little faith…
It is an excellent counterpoint, but it doesn’t seem to be the one the article is actually making. The fact is that he elevates a relatively murky philosophical issue over, say, the practical efforts to tackle the allegedly apocalyptic future events that he insists we can’t do anything about. Just because one guy says “science will solve everything and anything”, doesn’t make it any better when another guy says “we’re already dead, so don’t kid yourselves”.
There are times for being exact, and there are times for acknowledging that that is not how the Overton Window gets moved. In other words, I don’t see the world as that author does, but he provides another perspective to those marinated in cornucopianism.
Also, while I admit that I only read his article and not the whole book (many of the excerpts seem awfully familiar though), it seems to me that he does not literally mean that we are dead. Instead he merely uses individual death of a soldier in war as a parable for societal death.
And whether our society or culture is already dead and we can’t do anything about it depends on what you define as our society or culture. If you define your culture as Christian, English speaking, meat, wheat, potato and corn eating, trousers or skirts wearing (as opposed to Muslim, Arab speaking, rice eating and hajib wearing for example), then sure, good chances of survival no matter how bad the harvests fail. As long as 5% of us survive globally, that kind of culture is guaranteed survival.
But if our culture is defined as one of individual car ownership, mass consumerism and mass prosperity, internet using, etc., then… yeah. That’s what unsustainable means.
Scranton is very crafty. Almost priestly. His perspective is both sharply focused and fluid: humanity is going to go poof if we don’t embrace our humanity. The very characteristics that enabled us to get this far will keep us going but we have to use them. And we only will use them if we hold in mind that our demise will happen if we don’t implement our historical humanity, that is, our survival instincts.
Almost a mantra, and resembling in tone and intensity the Muslim refrain, ‘There is no god but God’, Scranton is saying there is no human but a Human.
His generation and peers (veterans from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars) warm up to his approach. That alone is positive as they contain the people that will have to do the significant lifting to avert disaster.
Roy Scranton’s words on death are thinly disguised buddhist meditations written for a general audience!
Check out this piece he also wrote entitled:
“Climate Change and the Dharma of Failure”
http://therevealer.org/archives/20418
P.S. Don’t be duped by the Jedi mind trick.
Parhaps we would be better served removing the root cause of all our ails, Capitalism and its culture of greed.
Optimism is the only option.
The “Green Revolution” was/is commercial imperialism at its worst. “The company store” on steroids.
I have been working the better part of my life on three projects. The working titles are Advancing Toward Eden, Culture Against Society, and The Corporate Feudal State.
They weave into each other in such complex ways that I have had a hell of a time getting the sequences right. And then there’s the age-old problem on not being able to turn off the idea spigot. This blog is partly to blame.
The driving theses are that Homo sap. [sick] started screwing up about 10, 12, or even fifteen thousand years ago, and started securing dominion over the earth by enslaving plants and animals, wrecking highly productive ecosystems in the process. We started competing instead of cooperating, enslaving each other and fighting over space and booty.
We can either go on ending it all or we could, presuming that we deserve the moniker, “sapiens,” and focus more on quality than quantity. See what I mean? Another inept summary. But space needs to be limited.
I feel for Scranton. He’s lived a hell on earth. It took a very bright guy to come up with a way to cope with the ultimate absurdity. I hope he can come to realize that he simply got caught up in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t hurricane of complex forces that no mortal could hope to extricate himself from.
I have been working the better part of my life on three projects. The working titles are Advancing Toward Eden, Culture Against Society, and The Corporate Feudal State. They weave into each other in such complex ways that I have had a hell of a time getting the sequences right. And then there’s the age-old problem on not being able to turn off the idea spigot. This blog is partly to blame.
The driving theses are that Homo sap. [sick] started screwing up about 10, 12, or even fifteen thousand years ago, and started securing dominion over the earth by enslaving plants and animals, wrecking highly productive ecosystems in the process. We started competing instead of cooperating, enslaving each other and fighting over space and booty. We can either go on ending it all or we could, presuming that we deserve the moniker, “sapiens,” and focus more on quality than quantity. See what I mean? Another inept summary. But space needs to be limited.
I feel for Scranton. He’s lived a hell on earth. It took a very bright guy to come up with a way to cope with the ultimate absurdity. I hope he can come to realize that he simply got caught up in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t hurricane of complex forces that no mortal could hope to extricate himself from.
I don’t know what I did wrong that produced a duplicate. I don’t know how to delete one of them.