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.
