You may take this as more optimistic blathering from within the pessimistic morass, but here goes.
Those of us who teach environmental studies — who teach impressionable young adults about the colossal challenges facing humanity in the coming decades, with the looming climate crisis, resource wars and (human and nonhuman) refugee crises, and mass extinction on a scale unseen for 66 million years — have to come up with ways to keep our students from losing all hope and sinking into a nihilistic abyss. More knowledge can sometimes just be debilitating. “Nothing to be done,” as Gogo and Didi remind each other while waiting for Godot.
Where do we find the hope that can complement our students’ new-found pessimism about the current human situation?
I find it in two places. One of them looks to the past and its continuation through the present — in the tales told by elders, storytellers, philosophers, and contemplatives, and those communities of practice that maintain those tales as living realities. The other looks to the future, or a future as envisioned by astrobiologists, those who study the possibilities of life’s arising throughout the universe.
One of the latter group, David Grinspoon, ends his wonderful 2004 book Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life positing that
“We are at a curious and frustrating stage of our evolution. We can conceive of a truly intelligent, sustainable, communicating society. But we don’t know if we can become one.” [emphasis added]
Which he follows up with this statement of faith:
“What do I really believe? I think our galaxy is full of species who have crawled up from the slime of their home worlds, evolved self-awareness and started to tinker, passed beyond the threat of technological self-extermination, and transcended their animal origins to move out into the cosmos. The vasty deep is thick with spirits. The wise ones are out there waiting for us to join them.”
The prospect of developing a science, a culture, and a spirituality that can get us through the sustainability bottleneck gives me hope. (That may make me a dreamer but, as John Lennon said, I’m not the only one. Hope one day you’ll join us.)
And if we fail? The impact on the other millions of living planets in this and other galaxies will have been minimal.
But the effort — not to save the world (none of us will do that, so you can stop trying right now), but to find some thing we love to do and are good at, and others to do it with, that can contribute to the overall goal rather than to its negation — that effort is worthwhile in itself. It may be the only thing that’s worthwhile.
Once you have that part figured out, I tell my students, enjoy every moment of it.
Here’s more Grinspoon, on the Anthropocene and the possibility of a “Sapiezoic” era beyond it:
Meanwhile, thanks to dmf for sharing Tom Waits’s view on it all: https://youtu.be/whPzJbntlnY
yer most welcome, if you get a chance check out Caputo on hope against hope, more kierkegaardian than the sort of hegelianish hopes of evolving hive-minds but i think a good work of post-derrida earthbound phenomenology:
Thanks Adrian, it’s a situation that I think most of us who work in both education and the environmental humanities (or any cognate areas) are continuously grappling with; or at least I seem to be wrestling with it much of the time. Rather differently to yourself, though, I do wonder whether it is my job to be supplying hope of any variety. On a re-reading of your post, it is “losing all hope and sinking into a nihilistic abyss” that you are most concerned about, and I have more sympathy with you here. But it is a fine line I seem to be walking as an educator. I don’t have time for optimism, I spend a lot of energy criticising false hopes, but I’m not peddling pessimism – cosmic or otherwise – to my students either. I guess the best I seem able to do is to walk them through the dark ecological network of extinctions, declines and other environmental, human and nonhuman crises and see where we and they might take it. But many of our teaching sessions seem to end in a kind of dark ecological aporia; not quite your nihilistic abyss, but a vertiginous state of heightened ecological anxiety. I’m heartened that for many students this then translates into different kinds of activism, but I’m hesitant to prescribe hope to them (or even to self-medicate with it).
“a vertiginous state of heightened ecological anxiety”
as an existential-alienist that sounds like a good days work if it lasts out the classroom door, they should be worried about drowning the tides are a rising and a hard rain gonna fall (unless they are in the drought zones of course)!
in my analytic practice i’m not peddling hope but the possibility of getting a grip on what’s happening (and what’s not) and the (always limited) options at hand, and i think that’s a reasonable hope too for teaching in a classroom.
Hi Paul –
Perhaps it feels worse in my introductory class to 200+ first-year students, many of whom are just learning about the full complexity (and full catastrophe) of human-environmental problems. Even the ones who come for an environmental education hadn’t realized how complex and intractable things are; and among the others are those who are just shocked. Once they get through that introduction and they stick with the program — a program that disproportionately attracts (and breeds) activists, and which provides a lot of outlets for engagement — things get much better.
I’m not sure I would see hope as something to be “prescribed.” But I do think that there are ways in which we educators convey a certain affective relationship to the world, and that it’s good if we can mix a more positive one with all the (necessary, and necessarily pessimistic) systemic critique. If we don’t provide a sense of excitement about possibilities, then we may be failing at what we do. The best teachers I’ve had have done that for me. That excitement can come from many places — from activist movements, from critical theories, from the love of philosophy and literature and music and art, from the endless creativity of human/cultural and evolutionary/natural inventiveness. But I also find it in a kind of science that isn’t afraid to speculate, which is why I find astrobiology (among other fields) endlessly fascinating.
So it’s less about optimism, and more about just not drowning in worry. The universe will live on. The earth may, too. And humans, however long we last, are pretty cool creatures as well (along with the others that share the Earth with us). I guess I just don’t have a lot of tolerance for misanthropic sourness (or the endless flagellation of capitalism, which is just another form of the former).
Hi Adrian, yes, I can imagine that a 200+ introductory first-year course would be a rather different experience; a heavy responsibility, but a great opportunity for communication and outreach too. I agree with most of what you say here. The best that I feel I can do pedagogically is introduce the inconvenient facts to the students and throw various possibilities for thinking and acting ecologically at them, exploring what they might make of or with the likes of Sessions, Plumwood, Morton, Leopold, Latour, Bennett, Deleuze, Guattari and the many others.
I must admit that I pass through my own variant of the Kübler-Ross cycle with some regularity – and ‘misanthropic sourness’ (or else a bleak or feral antihumanism) does make an appearance every so often, in addition to a rather minimalist form of hope, anger and the more worrying detachment and indifference strategies that afflict us all in our efforts to cope. I guess I may have a little more sympathy for the misanthropes and the depressive realists (a term that dmf may have coined elsewhere).
I appreciate your interest in the astrobiology and sustainability connection. As I mentioned in one of your previous posts, this is an integral element of my current project. I’ll perhaps send you a draft chapter when and if it ever progresses to a more viable form. The feedback would be welcome. Unfortunately the environmental, climatological and ecological situation is changing so rapidly, whatever I write seems to be trumped or overturned by new data and ever better examples within a matter of months.
Thanks for this, Adrian. Last week, I twice delivered a talk on the Anthropocene to large lecture courses. Inevitably, the sheer magnitude of the topic, coupled with the immense time scales at work, brings about a sense of radical insignificance of the human experience of space and time. This can, as we’ve talked about in the past, have a destabilizing effect — something that is not altogether a bad thing.
In the end of the talk, I have a way of coming back around to the question of experimentation in an era of deep environmental uncertainty – something I take from Lorimer, Haraway, and Grosz (amongst others). I suppose this is where I locate my “hope” (for lack of a better word): In what ways might we understand the Anthropocene to signal an expansion of the terrain of politics, far beyond the parameters of the human? In what ways might we craft alliances not only beyond corporeal limits, but also across different temporalities? There are, I think, exciting prospects to be located in these modes of thought. And, I’ve often found that students feel the same way, despite the initial difficulties to be had in overcoming human exceptionalism.
Harlan
To clarify: the hopeful modes of experimentation opened up by the Anthropocene do not, in my view, give way to the notion of the “Good Anthropocene” as expressed by Revkin, the BTI, Ecomodernists, and others. While experimentation, as such, is certainly a part of their overlapping agendas, it’s a mode of experimentation that strikes me as generally uncritical and one which reinforces human exceptionalism. As Latour remarked, “The ecomodernist manifesto is written entirely as if humans were still alone on stage.”
So, when I think of experimentation, I don’t have in mind an ‘anything goes’ approach. Rather, approaches must remain critical and attentive to social, historical, ideological, political, philosophical, etc. contingencies. To somewhat indelicately posit a dichotomy: there are good experiments, and there are bad ones. In my view, experiments that further re-entrench existing neoliberal orders – which I feel the BTI advocates – trend towards the latter.
Thanks for those thoughts, Harlan.
“In what ways might we understand the Anthropocene to signal an expansion of the terrain of politics, far beyond the parameters of the human? In what ways might we craft alliances not only beyond corporeal limits, but also across different temporalities?”
These are great questions…
I think what I was groping toward in the above post (in a not even half-baked way) was the notion that at some point the expansion of the terrain of politics reaches out toward what can only be called “spirituality,” or at least a kind of cosmic speculation. I realize that talking about feeling “at home in the universe” (which Stuart Kauffman and others sometimes do, not to mention the Epic of Evolution/Universe Story/New Genesis folks) sounds a little pollyannish given the situation we’re facing. But I think we can shed our “human exceptionalism” without landing only in a despairing “we’re fucked.” That, too, is a neurotic overreaction, whereas I want to locate a space where we can feel OK (and even some delight) with the dark ecology of the universe, and still be able to incorporate that into the politics by which we address our situation “down here.” Or something like that…
It’s all in those “hopeful modes of experimentation”…
“despairing “we’re fucked.” That, too, is a neurotic overreaction”
hey i resemble that remark, we mutant few prefer to talk in terms of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism
i’m actually all for hopeful modes of experimentation as long as they are based in something we can actually do with what and who we have at hand and not some scifi mass-scale social engineering blueprint that calls for us to be some other sort of critter than the kluged-together/buggy/cog-biased sapiens we be…
“depressive realism”… I love it. “Depressive realism argues not only that this negativity may reflect a more accurate appraisal of the world but also that non-depressed individuals’ appraisals are positively biased.” (I wonder if one could broaden that to say that “non-dead individuals’ appraisals are positively biased”–e.g., insofar as they are not only hoping to live another day, and acting on the assumption that they they will, but not even fretting much over the matter. Could a positive bias be built-in to life itself, in which case the mutants are genuine mutants?)
Your final sentence is brilliant… can I quote it? (elsewhere) Well, except that the word “sapiens” reflects that delusional positive bias… But I’ll take it as ironic. 😉
by all means if anything is useful i say use it,
times ticking on the big fix if we are going to get it in gear:
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2015/09/dirty-air-sends-millions-to-early-grave.html
It’s good to teach about colossal challenges young people, but let’s just take a look about their generation in this time. Don’t you think that everything goes in wrong direction, every young person want to mature. It’s hard to realize them that there is something much more important that how you look… right? Sorry for saying this but this world needs war. There is nothing you can do to prevent it.
Ha, clearly I should have simply typed ‘depressive realism’ into the search engine and I would have tracked its origins. As to positive bias and optimism being hard-wired, I think there is ever growing evidence that this is the case for humans, and some of this dovetails with research looking at the evolutionary origins of religiosity/spirituality too. Dean Hamer’s early and flawed work on the God gene was interesting because of its focus on the genetic basis and cognitive bias of optimism, while Morrison’s The Spirit in the Gene links spirituality (which he treats as a remarkably broad and often far too vague category) with a cognitive bias toward optimism. The research is still in its early stages but it seems very likely that part of the human package of cognitive tools, biases etc. is a certain confidence that things will turn our OK, that we might be the exception to rule. Of course, those tools, biases and blinkers have been beneficial in the past, but they have now brought us to ecological overshoot and catastrophe, while supporting a confidence that something or someone will come along to solve the problems, or – minimally – that we will muddle through.
The depressive realists – if such there are – may indeed be mutants; so, lets start looking for the ‘Cassandra gene’!
ah yes to my dismay we are one of the tiniest of the neurotribes, but we exist. so if ya need a blood sample for gengineering let me know.
you folks might be interested in the back&forth over @
http://enemyindustry.net/blog/?p=5869
Re: DMF
Cheers, I think we frequent the same dark ecological/collapse-oriented and trans/post/anti-humanist edges of the blogo-sphere (… synthetic_zero is one of my go to reads). So, yes, I’ve been watching the post vs trans vs zombie slapdown unfold with interest.
hey PR-B, yer excellent blogroll (is that the term?) is one of my main resources for keeping up w/ our little twist of the blogosphere, i think there are many folks thereabouts who talk “dark” but really believe that we can engineer (even if in a Romantic vitalist sort of way like my syn-zed comrades) our ways out of such tragic knots and so i really appreciate that you have linked me up with fellow travelers like Desdemona Despair and Wit’s End, for the record I’m not depressed (not given to doom-casting in general and all) just find all of this quite depressing.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/public-perception-australian-technology-and-energy-policy/6792262
https://soundcloud.com/pando-populus