by Roy Scranton
Also by the Author
War Porn
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
Copyright © 2018 by Roy Scranton
All rights reserved.
Published by
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Scranton, Roy, 1976– author.
We’re doomed, now what?:
essays on war and climate change / Roy Scranton.
ISBN 978-1-61695-936-4
eISBN 978-1-61695-937-1
1. Civilization, Modern—21st century. 2. Climatic changes. 3. War.
4. Social change. I. Title
CB428 .S425 2018 909.82—dc23 2017055380
Interior design by Janine Agro
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Sara
Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”
I.
Climate
& Change
We’re Doomed. Now What?
The time we’ve been thrown into is one of alarming and bewildering change—the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe. The world groans under the weight of seven billion humans; every new birth adds another mouth hungry for food, another life greedy for energy.
We all see what’s happening, we read it in the headlines every day, but seeing isn’t believing, and believing isn’t accepting. We respond according to our prejudices, acting out of instinct, reflex, and training. Right-wing denialists insist that climate change isn’t happening, or that it’s not caused by humans, or that the real problem is terrorism or refugees, while left-wing denialists insist that the problems are fixable, under our control, merely a matter of political will. Accelerationists argue that more technology is the answer. Incrementalists tell us to keep trusting the same institutions and leaders that have been failing us for decades. Activists say we have to fight, even if we’re sure to lose.
Meanwhile, as the gap between the future we’re entering and the future we once imagined grows ever wider, nihilism takes root in the shadow of our fear: if all is already lost, nothing matters anyway.
You can feel this nihilism in TV shows like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, and you can see it in the pull to nationalism, sectarianism, war, and racial hatred. We saw it in the election of Donald Trump. Nihilism defines our current moment, though in truth it’s nothing new. The Western world has been grappling with radical nihilism since at least the seventeenth century, when scientific insights into human behavior began to undermine religious belief. Philosophers have struggled since then to fill the gap between fact and meaning: Kant tried to reconcile empiricist determinism with God and Reason; Bergson and Peirce worked to merge Darwinian evolution and human creativity; more recent thinkers glean the stripped furrows neuroscience has left to logic and language.
Scientific materialism, taken to its extreme, threatens us with meaninglessness; if consciousness is reducible to the brain and our actions are determined not by will but by causes, then our values and beliefs are merely rationalizations for the things we were going to do anyway. Most people find this view of human life repugnant, if not incomprehensible.
In her book of essays The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson rejects the materialist view of consciousness, arguing for the existence of the human soul by insisting that the soul’s metaphysical character makes it impervious to materialist arguments. The soul, writes Robinson, is an intuition that “cannot be dispelled by proving the soul’s physicality, from which it is aloof by definition. And on these same grounds, its nonphysicality is no proof of its nonexistence.”
The biologist E. O. Wilson spins the problem differently: “Does free will exist?” he asks in The Meaning of Human Existence. “Yes, if not in ultimate reality, then at least in the operational sense necessary for sanity and thereby for the perpetuation of the human species.” Robinson offers an appeal to ignorance; Wilson, an appeal to consequences; both arguments are fallacious.
Yet as Wilson suggests, our dogged insistence on free agency makes a kind of evolutionary sense. Indeed, humanity’s keenest evolutionary advantage has been its drive to create collective meaning. That drive is as ingenious as it is relentless, and it can find a way to make sense of despair, depression, catastrophe, genocide, war, disaster, plagues, and even the humiliations of science.
Our drive to make meaning is powerful enough even to turn nihilism against itself. As Friedrich Nietzsche, one of Western philosophy’s most incisive diagnosticians of nihilism, wrote near the end of the nineteenth century: “Man will sooner will nothingness than not will.” This dense aphorism builds on one of the thoughts at the core of Nietzsche’s philosophy, today so widely accepted as to be almost unrecognizable, that human beings make their own meaning out of life.
In this view, there is no ultimate, transcendent moral truth. As Nietzsche put it in an early essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” truth is no more than a “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.” If we can stomach the moral vertigo this idea might induce, we can also see how it’s not necessarily nihilistic but, in the right light, a testament to human resilience.
The human ability to make meaning is so versatile, so powerful, that it can make almost any existence tolerable, even a life of unending suffering, so long as that life is woven into a bigger story that makes it meaningful. Humans have survived and thrived in some of the most inhospitable environments on Earth, from the deserts of Arabia to the ice fields of the Arctic, because of this ability to organize collective life around symbolic constellations of meaning: anirniit, capital, jihad. “If we have our own why in life,” Nietzsche wrote, “we shall get along with almost any how.”
When he wrote “Man will sooner will nothingness than not will,” Nietzsche was exposing the destructive side of humanity’s meaning-making drive. That drive is so powerful, Nietzsche’s saying, that when forced to the precipice of nihilism, we would choose meaningful self-annihilation over meaningless bare life. This insight was horrifically borne out in the Götterdämmerung of Nazi Germany, just as it’s being borne out today in every new suicide attack by jihadi terrorists—even as it’s being borne out here at home in Trump’s willfully destructive politics of rage. We risk it when we stumble toward another thoughtless war, asking young men and women to throw their lives away so we might continue believing America means something. As a character in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise remarks: “War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.”
Nietzsche wasn’t himself a nihilist. He developed his idea of truth as a “mobile army of metaphors” into a more complex philosophy of perspectivism, which conceived of subjective truth as a variety of constructions arising out of particular perspectives on objective reality. The more perspectives we learn to see from, the more truth we have access to. This is different from relativism, with which it’s often confused, which says that all truth is relative and there is no objective reality. Fundamentally, Nietzsche was an empiricist who believed that beyond all of our interpretations there was, at last, something we can call the world—even if we can never quite apprehend it objectively. “Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience,” he wrote. “Just beyond it their thinking ceases an
d their endless empty space and stupidity begins.”
Nietzsche’s positive philosophical project, what he called his “gay science,” was to create the conditions for the possibility of a human being who could comprehend the meaninglessness of our drive to make meaning, yet nonetheless affirm human existence: a human being who could learn amor fati, the love of one’s fate.1 This was his much-misunderstood idea of the “overman.” Nietzsche labored mightily to create this new human ideal for philosophy because he needed it so badly himself. A gloomy, oversensitive pessimist and self-declared decadent who eventually went mad, he struggled all his life to convince himself that his life was worth living.
Today, as every hour brings new alarms of war and climate disaster, we might wish we could take Nietzsche’s place. He had to cope only with the death of God, after all, while we must come to terms with the death of our whole world. Peril lurks on every side, from the delusions of hope to the fury of reaction, from the despondency of hopelessness to the promise of destruction.
We stand today on a precipice of annihilation that Nietzsche could not have even imagined. There is little reason to presume that we’ll be able to slow down global warming before we pass a tipping point. We’ve already exceeded 1.5° Celsius above preindustrial temperatures and there’s more warming baked in.2 The West Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, Greenland is melting, permafrost across the world is liquefying, and methane has been detected leaking from sea floors and Siberian craters: it’s probably already too late to stop these feedbacks, which means it’s probably already too late to stop apocalyptic planetary warming. Meanwhile the world slides into hate-filled, bloody havoc, like the last act of a particularly ugly Shakespearean tragedy.
Accepting our situation could easily be confused with nihilism. In a nation founded on hope, built with “can do” Yankee grit, and bedazzled by its own technological wizardry, the very idea that something might be beyond our power or that humans have intrinsic limits verges on blasphemy. Right and left, millions of Americans believe that every problem has a solution; suggesting otherwise stirs a deep and hostile resistance. It’s not so much that accepting the truth of our situation means thinking the wrong thought, but rather thinking the unthinkable.
Yet it’s at just this moment of crisis that our human drive to make meaning reappears as our only salvation . . . if we’re willing to reflect consciously on the ways we make life meaningful—on how we decide what is good, what our goals are, what’s worth living or dying for, and what we do every day, day to day, and how we do it. Because if it’s true that we make our lives meaningful ourselves and not through revealed wisdom handed down by God or the Market or History, then it’s also true that we hold within ourselves the power to change our lives—wholly, utterly—by changing what our lives mean. Our drive to make meaning is more powerful than oil, the atom, and the market, and it’s up to us to harness that power to secure the future of the human species.
We can’t do it by clinging to the progressivist, profit-seeking, technology-can-fix-it ideology of fossil-fueled capitalism. We can’t do it by trying to control the future. We need to learn to let our current civilization die, to accept our mortality, and to practice humility. We need to work together to transform a global order of meaning focused on accumulation into a new order of meaning that knows the value of limits, transience, and restraint.
Most important, we need to give up defending and protecting our truth, our perspective, our Western values, and understand that truth is found not in one perspective but in its multiplication, not in one point of view but in the aggregate, not in opposition but in the whole. We need to learn to see not just with Western eyes but with Islamic eyes and Inuit eyes, not just with human eyes but with golden-cheeked warbler eyes, coho salmon eyes, and polar bear eyes, and not even just with eyes but with the wild, barely articulate being of clouds and seas and rocks and trees and stars.
We were born on the eve of what may be the human world’s greatest catastrophe. None of us chose this, not deliberately. None of us can choose to avoid it, either. Some of us may even live through it. What meaning we pass on to the future will depend on how well we remember those who have come before us, how wisely and how gently we’re able to shed the ruinous way of life that’s destroying us today, and how consciously we’re able to affirm our role as creators of our fated future.
Accepting the fatality of our situation isn’t nihilism, but rather the necessary first step in forging a new way of life. Between self-destruction and giving up, between willing nothingness and not willing, there is another choice: willing our fate. Conscious self-creation. We owe it to the generations whose futures we’ve burned and wasted to build a bridge, to be a bridge, to connect the diverse human traditions of meaning-making in our past to those survivors, the children of the Anthropocene, who will build a new world among our ruins. [2015/2017]
Arctic Ghosts
At the top of the world, a great wheel is spinning. Circling the Arctic Ocean, a current called the Beaufort Gyre drives pack ice clockwise around the pole. It pulls warm Pacific currents through the Bering Strait north and west above Siberia, pushes into the East Siberian Sea and the Transpolar Drift, then rolls away from Russia and whips south against Greenland and the archipelagic frontier forming the rocky distant rim of the Canadian Shield. As winter descends and the seas freeze, the gyre drives newly formed ice against the landfast floe edging those northmost coasts, thickening the ice in ridges and layers, and bit by bit forces drift ice into the straits that form the Northwest Passage. As winter thaws to summer, the pack ice breaks up into the Chukchi Sea, where warm Pacific waters join the gyre as it turns again in its grinding cycle.
The pack ice that the gyre drives around the top of the world breathes with the seasons, expanding in winter, contracting in summer, regular as a heartbeat. Over the past thirty years, though, the total amount has shrunk: minimum summer sea-ice area has decreased by more than half, as has estimated summer sea-ice thickness. Even more alarming, total summer sea-ice volume is less than a quarter of what it was a generation ago. Think of how an ice cube melts in three dimensions. Scientists at the Polar Science Center and the National Snow and Ice Data Center expect summer sea ice to disappear entirely as early as 2030. Some people are calling this dramatic decline the “Arctic death spiral.” It will mean the end of the Arctic as we know it.
The Beaufort Gyre is just one wheel in a vast convolution of interconnected wheels that make up the global climate system: the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Gulf Stream, the carbon cycle, and many, many more. As one wheel speeds up, slows down, changes, or disappears, it affects all the others, feeding back into the system. The Arctic death spiral will work like that: as white ice melts into dark water, it will diminish Earth’s ability to reflect light and heat back into space, thus increasing overall warming. Methane and other carbon compounds frozen in Arctic permafrost will thaw and flow into the atmosphere, intensifying greenhouse-gas effects and increasing overall warming. Deep-ocean circulation, which depends on differences in temperature and salinity to move water around the world, will slow and shut down, radically changing regional climates, contributing to sea-level rise, and increasing overall warming.
To see the Arctic death spiral firsthand and to see the Arctic before it melted, I took a seventeen-day “adventure cruise” with the outdoor expedition company Adventure Canada: “Into the Northwest Passage 2015.”
Cedar Swan, Adventure Canada CEO: “On my first trip, when I was fourteen, we were cruising in a little fjord just south of Kangerlussuaq. We came right up to the foot of a glacier, and we were Zodiacking there and it was amazing and everything was wonderful. Then I went back to that exact same glacier in 2007, and there was nothing but rocks.”
Tagak Curley, Inuk hunter, former Canadian legislator, co-founder of the territory of Nunavut, Adventure Canada resource staff: “I can confirm that the seasons have changed. We had colder weather when we were kids. The
freezing and snow would normally come a lot earlier, even the first week in September. And now, mostly, almost about a month later we start seeing freezing on the lakes. In terms of the sea, it’s dangerous in some parts to travel on the sea ice in October, even November. If that were forty, fifty years ago, the base would be solid and the floe edge would be a few miles away from the shore line.”
Our journey began in the Alpine Room of the Sheraton Gateway Hotel Toronto. Enthusiastic Adventure Canada staff in migraine-blue shirts with polar-bear logos went over the basic outlines of our cruise. A total of 191 fellow “adventurers” listened politely, a crowd of mostly white, mostly silver-haired retired couples in various stages of physical decline, with a few singletons and only a smattering of younger blood—I counted a half-dozen under fifty, including myself. The plan was to sail north up the west coast of Greenland, go west into Canada through Lancaster Sound, then sail north around Victoria Island and down through the Prince of Wales Strait to Kugluktuk, although our final route would depend on the sea ice. Along the way, we’d clamber into black-hulled Zodiac boats for a series of landings and excursions. It was hammered home to us that this wasn’t just a cruise but an “expedition,” and that we had to be ready for anything.
From Toronto, we flew to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, where we boarded the MS Ocean Endeavour, a 450-foot-long converted ferry built in Poland, ice class 1B, first registered as the Konstantin Simonov in Russia, now owned by the ship-management company FleetPro, based in Switzerland. The weather in Kangerlussuaq was auspicious, warm and clear, with temperatures in the forties and fifties Fahrenheit, where they would remain for the entire cruise. We steamed that night into a refulgent midnight sunset, magenta and coral clouds glowing over the craggy gneiss walls of the fjord, and in the morning woke at Sisimiut, a Greenland fishing town comprising many small, brightly colored square houses, like Legos scattered in the sun. The ship spent the day taking on supplies while we wandered around town. A shop sold gleaming silver sealskin gloves and wiry balls of musk-ox yarn. Sled dogs yipped and howled from their yards.
