As we prepare for another Climate Change Conference of the Parties, and all the activist organizing around it, it’s important for us to come to terms with exactly what we are dealing with. This post approaches climate change from a somewhat oblique, exo-planetary perspective.
I have given a few talks recently in which I propose that climate change, along with its “traumatic core,” is analogous to the phenomena encountered by the fictional scientist-visitors to the planet Solaris in Stanislaw Lem’s 1962 novel of that name and its cinematic adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky. As Lem put it,
The peculiarity of those phenomena [witnessed on Solaris] seems to suggest that we observe a kind of rational activity, but the meaning of this seemingly rational activity of the Solarian Ocean is beyond the reach of human beings.
Attempting to make sense of that “seemingly rational activity” comes to be called “Solaristics.” But alongside that activity, the Solarian ocean triggers psychological and metaphysical traumas for the humans who visit it. Solaristics, or the effort to learn about this ontologically indeterminate alien Other, becomes a profoundly unsettling activity: it is, Slavoj Zizek describes it, an encounter with one’s own “traumas, dreams, fears, desires… the innermost of your inner space.”
Here I want to compare that argument with a different kind of “encounter phenomenon,” that of reported sightings and encounters with scientifically anomalous non-human intelligences, or SANHI. I take that term from the literature on UFOs and ETs, but modify it to make clear that it doesn’t include scientifically accepted or explainable non-human intelligence, such as that found in other mammals, cetaceans, cephalopods, and the like.
Comparing climate trauma to things like UFOs and ETs risks trivializing the former, which is not my intent. But it only does that if one is unaware of the scope of data on the myriad of phenomena encompassed within this term. Such “intelligences” may include spirits, angels, fairies, aliens, ghosts, presences of an archetypal or mysterious kind, deities or divinities of various kinds, and other entities that are experienced as being “intelligent.” First-person, second-person, and third-person reports of encounters with such entities have taken countless forms over the centuries and continue to do that today — think of the many people around the world who have claimed to see images of or hear the voice of the Virgin Mary in one of her multiple forms, or of countless Hindu deities. If nothing else, the volume and cross-cultural scope of this database of “anecdotal evidence” makes it appropriate to ask what the nature of these encounters is and isn’t. The fact that such encounters have given rise to mass social movements and altered the course of history many times makes it all the more clear that they require study and understanding.
To the extent that there is a scientific consensus on the reality of such things, it is that these reports are a mixture of error (perceptual, technological, methodological, and/or philosophical), hallucination (individual and/or collective), and fabrication. This consensus is rooted in a general ontological understanding that we could call “scientific materialism,” but when that understanding is looked at closely, it becomes evident that it’s not entirely coherent and unified, and that there are some respectable alternatives being developed.
Scientists study that which can be materially observed (using our physical senses and their technological extensions), documented, and reliably quantified. Reports of encounters with SANHI can certainly be documented, quantified, and hypothesized about, but actual SANHI have eluded that kind of study. That puts them into the category of scientifically anomalous phenomena, alongside psychic (psi) capacities, time travel, and other such things. (The evidence for psi is much stronger, at this point, than the evidence for time travel, but until there is a broadly recognized community of researchers operating with well established theoretical frameworks, psi will tend to be regarded as anomalous. Both psi and time travel have theoretical frameworks to work with, so this is really more a matter of degree — of theoretical consensus, of institutional credibility and recognition, of research productivity, and so on.)
In another sense, we could say there is no scientific consensus on the ontological status of such phenomena because there is no recognizable, international, organized community of scientists or scholars devoted specifically to their study. Such study has always been dispersed across multiple, disparate fields, from religious studies and anthropology to psychology, philosophy, and occasional forays into physics, biology, neuroscience, and the like. In other words, whatever consensus may exist is a product of the lack of a research community devoted to studying the topic. Which means, the best we can say about these phenomena, scientifically, is that they are either “nothing” (illusions, frauds, make-believe, etc.) or that they are something we can’t explain. The latter is the avenue I will take.
The ontological indeterminacy of “Exo Studies”
Given the success of the ontological turn within some fields (notably cultural anthropology and science and technology studies), it is legitimate to ask questions about the ontological status of SANHI not just as an element of human belief in specific cultural milieus (which anthropologists have long done), but as a category of phenomenon whose reality is undetermined.
Fortunately, there is a growing scholarly literature that can help us with this. And just as fortunately, Sean Esbjörn-Hargens has recently done us the great service of laying out as many as ten hypotheses about UFOs and ETs, and of SANHI more broadly, and of trying to bring some sense to them through the application of a coherent, if not widely known, ontological framework. (The framework he brings is Wilberian four-quadrant ontology, which I’ve written about before; see here and here.)
Esbjörn-Hargens (whom I’ll sometimes call “E-H”) is a Wilberian integral theorist, whose work on climate change and “integral ecology” I’ve discussed previously. He is also the founder of an institute and web site devoted to Exo Studies, his name for the “metadisciplinary study of all the anomalous phenomena that lie outside our current models of explanation and views of reality.” While the “our” in that statement is left vague (he seems to mean “contemporary science”), the scope of anomalous phenomena he covers is quite broad — from UFO contactees, astral travel, and psychic phenomena to synchronicity, panpsychism, posthumanism, transhumanism, indigenous cosmologies, multiverses, the secret space program, and the new world order. If this breadth appears too indiscriminate (do Karen Barad’s and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s ontological theories really deserve no more study than David Icke’s theories of reptilian aliens controlling the world?), the same feature characterizes E-H’s attempt to create an “integrated” hypothesis that draws on all of the others, more or less equally, which becomes hypothesis #11: the Mutual Enactment Hypothesis.
But we can work our own way through this landscape without necessarily following the all-embracing path E-H proposes. To my mind, five of his ten hypotheses stand out as more serious and worthy of consideration. (I’m expanding here on the two I wrote about earlier this year.) I list them here in very rough order of their scientific “credibility” (to the extent that that can be judged):
- The Intrapsychic Hypothesis (IPH), which accounts for the experiences through different psychological processes, such as false memory, projection, trauma, hypnagogic sleep, altered states of consciousness, and hallucinations;
- The Psychosocial Hypothesis (PSH), which accounts for them through socio-psychological dynamics such as mass hysteria, archetypal manifestations, and collective psi phenomena;
- The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH), which is favored by many ufologists and “contactees,” but for obvious reasons has not convinced the scientific community (though see Diana Pasulka’s American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology for a fascinating study of some exceptions); it is of course mostly relevant to “intelligences” that appear to present themselves as being from outside our planetary system;
- The Extradimensional Hypothesis (EDH), which acts as a kind of grab-bag of possibilities indicating ontological dimensions of reality that are as yet unknown or uncharted by science writ large; and
- The Co-Creative Hypothesis, which posits SANHIs as “independent beings” of one kind or another (e.g., ETs or EDs) whose appearance in human experience is partially shaped by expectations, cultural frames, and unconscious cognitive-perceptual biases.
For the record, something like the latter is the hypothesis I developed in my 2001 study of New Age and ecospiritual practitioners in Glastonbury, U.K., and Sedona, Arizona. I called it a “co-constructionist” hypothesis and took its main players to be humans, with the social-psychological and cultural factors that accompany them, and the various nonhuman forces extant at specific geographic locations. Those forces could include the knowable (biological, ecological, geophysical) as well as the unknowable or “anomalous,” so in theory this approach could lend credence to those whom I interviewed who told me about various spiritual or god-like entities from both off-planet and on (or, for that matter, “in”). But ultimately, my goal was to broaden constructivist and post-constructivist approaches like actor-network and assemblage theories to include things that were ontologically “underdetermined.” (This wasn’t necessarily original. John Law, in his wonderful introduction to “method assemblage” theory, discussed Aboriginal ontologies, and the “ontological turn” within anthropology was certainly well in progress, even if not named as such yet.)
It is the concept of “ontological indeterminacy” that is key to understanding SANHI, just as it is to Lem’s/Tarkovsky’s fictional Solaristics. Esbjörn-Hargens insightfully connects ontological indeterminacy to Derridean “undecidability,” but also traces it back to Charles Fort’s rather Heisenbergian attribution of a “quasi-existence” to everything: “all phenomena are approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness” (Complete Books of Charles Fort, 1919/1974, p. 14). Fort, whose work has been championed particularly effectively by religious studies rock star Jeffrey Kripal (whose work I review in an upcoming publication), refers to this approach as “intermediatism,” a term that resonates deeply with the post-quantum “new materialism” of Karen Barad, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and others.
Esbjörn-Hargens begins to outline a provocative typology of objects, including his own “multiple object” (which climate change served as an example of) and “metaobject,” Timothy Morton’s “hyperobject,” and Jeffrey Kripal’s “magical” and “mythical” objects. More interesting is his discussion of a set of distinctions credited to Bryan Sentes between four kinds of reality: the everyday real; the capital-r Real, which, in a Lacanian sense, “intrudes on the real and ‘recasts, redefines, and reconfigures” it; the hyperreal, which, à la Baudrillard, entails a reversal or scrambling of the relationship between original and copy; and the hyporeal, which Sentes describes as that “when an original object or phenomenon … is not amenable to current representations and does not conform to individual reference points or cultural frames.”
E-H’s overall argument, with its reliance on Wilberian ontology, is not entirely convincing to me, but it raises interesting questions and serves as a wonderful literature review. Where I want to take it is to a deeper engagement with the relationship between the ontologically indeterminate objects of these encounters — those SANHI, whatever form they take — and the ontological effects that they elicit upon us, who encounter them.
One of the recurrent debates in the ET encounter literature is over whether these are more often traumatizing or inspiring and spiritually transformational; in other words, whether their effects are broadly negative or broadly positive. From my own cursory review of recent literature — including books by Pasulka, Kripal, research undertaken by the FREE and CCRI projects, and New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal’s new book on John Mack, among others — it seems to me that the “optimists” may be gaining the upper hand. But the “doubleness,” as Kripal calls it, the two-sidedness (if not multi-sidedness) that both threatens our sense of self and suggests that may not be an altogether bad thing, will not go away.
That’s where I feel the first two hypotheses I listed — the intrapsychic and the psychosocial — deserve full credit alongside the co-creative and the extradimensional. (The extraterrestial hypothesis, with its practical requirement of physical evidence of extraterrestrials, applies most specifically to UFO and ET encounters, and since I’m applying this to more Earth-based phenomena, I can comfortably leave that one aside.)
Climate trauma as an exo/endo meta-object
To understand climate change and our relationship to it, I have argued, we have to understand climate trauma — that is, the impacts that the idea and reality of climate change have and will have on us. Climate trauma is a multi-leveled event-space or Zone: it is pre-traumatic, becoming-traumatized, already-traumatizing, and continuously traumatizing/post-traumatic, in varying registers for different groups of people. This makes of climate change not only a massively distributed hyperobject, as Tim Morton claims (or hyper-event, as I prefer), but a “multiple object” and “metaobject,” as E-H calls it. It is “meta” in being objective, subjective, interobjective, and intersubjective all at once. (Those are the four Wilberian ontological domains, registers, or “quadrants.” E-H calls them “stations” here, a term I don’t find very evocative, so I will stick to domains and registers.)
As with any trauma-inducing encounter with some indeterminate or at least not fully known meta-object, what transpires will always include intrapsychic as well as psychosocial effects and processes. The mental effects of climate change have already been charted out — by the American Psychological Association among others — and, being a collective encounter, climate change will no doubt have collective effects (of which “mass hysteria,” among those listed above, is certainly possible). In its objectivity, climate change is also an “independent being”; even if not intelligent, it, or the biogeochemical (et al.) processes that make it up, has an agency of its own. So the “co-creative” or “co-constructionist” hypothesis certainly makes sense for understanding climate trauma.
The only question is whether the “extradimensional” hypothesis is worth considering alongside the other three. Might the planetary scope and significance — the semiotic massiveness — of climate change involve “spillover” into ontological dimensions that have not yet been explained and documented scientifically, but which are arguably evident in the other kinds of encounters with SANHI that have been reported on for centuries? If that hypothesis makes sense for those other encounters, then it ought to as well for climate trauma.
The main difference, as I see it, between human encounters with climate change (/trauma) and reported encounters with SANHI is this: climate change poses us, humanity, as the main agent responsible for what is happening. It doesn’t propose any other entities as responsible for it. This means that it raises questions about us in an even more direct way: Who more specifically has been responsible for climate change? Who will be more, and who less, affected by it? In this, it is likely to trigger much more soul-searching about our relationships to each other — humans to other humans, wealthy humans to poor humans, older generations to younger and future generations, beneficiaries of fossil-fuel civilization to victims of it, and so on — than anything an encounter with an ET is likely to motivate.
That soul-searching is far from guaranteed, if by that we mean genuine questioning of oneself. More likely will be the kinds of responses we have seen so much of already — of denial, gaslighting, blameshifting and victim-blaming, and all the other psychological mechanisms that are activated when one realizes what one is facing, and when one notices that others nearby could be made to suffer the costs instead.
If the first stage is denialism in all those Trumpian forms, then the second is a herd-like strutting about in the illusionistic dry ice of half-measures, pseudo-commitments, and policies destined to fail. “Yes, I’m on board, too — look what we’ve just announced!,” accompanied by “It’s not us, it’s them,” “Our hands are tied,” and the continued constant escape of greenhouse flatulence into the warming atmosphere.
We will see what happens in Glasgow. (And in the meantime, put pressure on the Kyrsten Sinemas, Joe Manchins, and other backsliding leverage tippers of the world.)
But the meta-object will not go away.
