On the subject of doom
Aug. 21st, 2011 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mirrorshardI've been thinking a lot recently about Uncivilisation, the Dark Mountain project, activism in general, the bardic tradition, and the imperatives of religion.
My feeling is that the way into this is mostly down to looking at the concept of doom in more detail, and decomposing it—working out what we mean by it, what social baggage comes with it, and what's actually going to happen.
There's a general feeling, in all the social & intellectual circles I move in, that in the near future things are going to go really badly, including but not limited to any of the following:
...bored with listing disasters now. The important thing is that none of them are universal; none of them are the end of the world. Even in the most extreme case, where the chemical makeup of the atmosphere falls off the catastrophe curve and we all run out of oxygen, life on Earth will carry on and in another few million years another civilisation will come along. We won't be around to see it, but then none of us will be around in any case, so that's no kind of excuse for not being reassured by that.
So: whatever the Oncoming Doom, something will survive. Thinking otherwise is fundamentally lazy, and not just lazy; it's the arrogance of despair, an abrogation of responsibility. If it's the end of the world, we may as well party; there's no point doing the cleanup, because there probably won't be any tomorrow.
(There's a lot of discussion flying around about why people feel this way, roughly centring on powerlessness, community membership, enfranchisement, and perception of the future, after the recent English riots. Not really going to go into it here, partly because we're still in the more-heat-than-light stage of commentary.)
The other problem with talking about doom is that it's not unitary. It's not one single malignant force, one archenemy, one conceptual supervillain. It's not even a horde of rats gnawing on the roots of our civilisation. It's entropy. Unless we make a serious and sustained effort, things fall apart; infrastructure and institutions decay; niceness fatigue sets in. It's just how the world works.
This is a really useful concept, in several ways. First, it lets us stop over-focusing our efforts; second, it gives us a break from hatred of anything in particular; and third, it reminds us that the world is broken. Cracked, crazed, chipped and battered, but still good for use. It's not some perfect porcelain vase, wobbling on the edge of the table of civilisation, a hair's breadth away from the hard kitchen tiles of doom. We've been here before; we're here every day. It's not a problem that requires Hero Solutions; we just keep doing the same things we do all along, coping with brokenness, mending what we can, and stopping what we dislike.
The temptation there is to min-max the effort we put in, measuring it against expected return over a timescale. The particularly pernicious part of that temptation is that it involves both marginal returns (you have to put as much energy in to fix the remaining small problems after fixing the big problems as you did to fix the big problems initially) and discounting further-future returns compared to near-future returns. So there's a natural tendency to a) put in only as much effort as will get you a decent return soon, and b) when competing with others, there's a natural pressure to settle for less reward sooner.
The other really salient question is where and how it's possible to put the effort in. Some problems are very tractable to individual effort; some are only solvable by massive coordinated effort; some need not just massive coordinated effort but a large variety & depth of technology supporting them. Some are not solvable. Neil Postman's aphorism "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" is very relevant here; if you're used to thinking in terms of policy or governance, you'll usually come up with solutions in those areas, and a scientist or engineer will try and apply their own professional expertise. This isn't a bad tendency, except when it leads us to devalue others' contributions.
Given that everything is to some extent interconnected, it's very tempting to think that if you can just find the right string to pull, and pull hard enough, then everything will fall into place. There are two basic problems with this approach.
The first, and less important, is that it never works, and usually makes things worse.
The second is that it's very divisive, because the natural tendency is to privilege your own viewpoint, and fight for your corner. Your perception of the problem is more likely to be accurate than other people's; your plan to deal with it is better and more likely to be successful. (If you don't believe that, and if you're still thinking in terms of The Problem, why speak up at all?) And worse, why is everyone else insisting on sticking to their own corner, playing with their own toys, rather than uniting behind you? Or if they can't do that, they should unite behind someone, because concentrating everyone's effort on one project will either save the world, or rule out that option and provide some more information along the way.
...yeah, would you like being told by someone else that the only useful contribution you can make is as a tiny component in one massive project after another, and that it's the exact same thing as everyone else's contribution?
It might or might not be right, but it's betting against human nature, and that never ends well.
To an extent, it's a privilege thing; there are very few people with the intellectual & social confidence to define Big Problems, and propose and push through Big Projects to fix them. And they're mostly middle-class minority-world white male technocrats, so that stacks the deck in favour of minority-world technocratic projects. (Big Engineering, Big Ecology, or Big IT, generally, because that's what technocrats find sexy and what they can apply their expertise to.)
It's also a common activist pathology, especially amongst the older generations. Germaine Greer talks in The Whole Woman (a book with many failings, but it's not by any means all fail) about horizontal hostility among oppressed peoples, and it's seen as the single biggest characteristic of the hard left (and hard right) in the UK—turning on each other rather than on their actual enemies. In other fields, it's known as "oppression Olympics", and it's a tedious waste of time. Intersectionality, thankfully, is taking more of a hold.
So what's the answer? — Don't look to me for answers, I'm a bard and a scientist. I'll show you a mirror and a story, and help you break down the question till it makes sense. When it does, when you have a piece of a problem you can solve, a little bit of entropy you can turn into order again: you know what to do.
You know your own abilities best, and you know the tools you've got. Don't let anyone tell you that your contribution is any less valuable, and don't be tempted to do it to them. Doing your own thing whole-heartedly and with love & kindness will get you, and everyone else, a lot further than doing something "better" with half your heart. The future needs scientists, engineers, gardeners, farmers, tea-makers, washers-up, police, prophets, artists, poets, film-makers, critics, storytellers, and—most of all—friends.
My feeling is that the way into this is mostly down to looking at the concept of doom in more detail, and decomposing it—working out what we mean by it, what social baggage comes with it, and what's actually going to happen.
There's a general feeling, in all the social & intellectual circles I move in, that in the near future things are going to go really badly, including but not limited to any of the following:
- the rise of neo-feudalism and/or fascism in the UK and the rest of Europe
- increasing ecological catastrophes due to out-of-control capitalism
- dramatically increasing extreme weather events due to global warming
- a massive increase in the number of displaced people due to sea-level rises
- even more global famine due to changes in weather patterns
- changes in the atmosphere due to volcanic activity, methane release, algal blooms, or pollution
...bored with listing disasters now. The important thing is that none of them are universal; none of them are the end of the world. Even in the most extreme case, where the chemical makeup of the atmosphere falls off the catastrophe curve and we all run out of oxygen, life on Earth will carry on and in another few million years another civilisation will come along. We won't be around to see it, but then none of us will be around in any case, so that's no kind of excuse for not being reassured by that.
So: whatever the Oncoming Doom, something will survive. Thinking otherwise is fundamentally lazy, and not just lazy; it's the arrogance of despair, an abrogation of responsibility. If it's the end of the world, we may as well party; there's no point doing the cleanup, because there probably won't be any tomorrow.
(There's a lot of discussion flying around about why people feel this way, roughly centring on powerlessness, community membership, enfranchisement, and perception of the future, after the recent English riots. Not really going to go into it here, partly because we're still in the more-heat-than-light stage of commentary.)
The other problem with talking about doom is that it's not unitary. It's not one single malignant force, one archenemy, one conceptual supervillain. It's not even a horde of rats gnawing on the roots of our civilisation. It's entropy. Unless we make a serious and sustained effort, things fall apart; infrastructure and institutions decay; niceness fatigue sets in. It's just how the world works.
This is a really useful concept, in several ways. First, it lets us stop over-focusing our efforts; second, it gives us a break from hatred of anything in particular; and third, it reminds us that the world is broken. Cracked, crazed, chipped and battered, but still good for use. It's not some perfect porcelain vase, wobbling on the edge of the table of civilisation, a hair's breadth away from the hard kitchen tiles of doom. We've been here before; we're here every day. It's not a problem that requires Hero Solutions; we just keep doing the same things we do all along, coping with brokenness, mending what we can, and stopping what we dislike.
The temptation there is to min-max the effort we put in, measuring it against expected return over a timescale. The particularly pernicious part of that temptation is that it involves both marginal returns (you have to put as much energy in to fix the remaining small problems after fixing the big problems as you did to fix the big problems initially) and discounting further-future returns compared to near-future returns. So there's a natural tendency to a) put in only as much effort as will get you a decent return soon, and b) when competing with others, there's a natural pressure to settle for less reward sooner.
The other really salient question is where and how it's possible to put the effort in. Some problems are very tractable to individual effort; some are only solvable by massive coordinated effort; some need not just massive coordinated effort but a large variety & depth of technology supporting them. Some are not solvable. Neil Postman's aphorism "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" is very relevant here; if you're used to thinking in terms of policy or governance, you'll usually come up with solutions in those areas, and a scientist or engineer will try and apply their own professional expertise. This isn't a bad tendency, except when it leads us to devalue others' contributions.
Given that everything is to some extent interconnected, it's very tempting to think that if you can just find the right string to pull, and pull hard enough, then everything will fall into place. There are two basic problems with this approach.
The first, and less important, is that it never works, and usually makes things worse.
The second is that it's very divisive, because the natural tendency is to privilege your own viewpoint, and fight for your corner. Your perception of the problem is more likely to be accurate than other people's; your plan to deal with it is better and more likely to be successful. (If you don't believe that, and if you're still thinking in terms of The Problem, why speak up at all?) And worse, why is everyone else insisting on sticking to their own corner, playing with their own toys, rather than uniting behind you? Or if they can't do that, they should unite behind someone, because concentrating everyone's effort on one project will either save the world, or rule out that option and provide some more information along the way.
...yeah, would you like being told by someone else that the only useful contribution you can make is as a tiny component in one massive project after another, and that it's the exact same thing as everyone else's contribution?
It might or might not be right, but it's betting against human nature, and that never ends well.
To an extent, it's a privilege thing; there are very few people with the intellectual & social confidence to define Big Problems, and propose and push through Big Projects to fix them. And they're mostly middle-class minority-world white male technocrats, so that stacks the deck in favour of minority-world technocratic projects. (Big Engineering, Big Ecology, or Big IT, generally, because that's what technocrats find sexy and what they can apply their expertise to.)
It's also a common activist pathology, especially amongst the older generations. Germaine Greer talks in The Whole Woman (a book with many failings, but it's not by any means all fail) about horizontal hostility among oppressed peoples, and it's seen as the single biggest characteristic of the hard left (and hard right) in the UK—turning on each other rather than on their actual enemies. In other fields, it's known as "oppression Olympics", and it's a tedious waste of time. Intersectionality, thankfully, is taking more of a hold.
So what's the answer? — Don't look to me for answers, I'm a bard and a scientist. I'll show you a mirror and a story, and help you break down the question till it makes sense. When it does, when you have a piece of a problem you can solve, a little bit of entropy you can turn into order again: you know what to do.
You know your own abilities best, and you know the tools you've got. Don't let anyone tell you that your contribution is any less valuable, and don't be tempted to do it to them. Doing your own thing whole-heartedly and with love & kindness will get you, and everyone else, a lot further than doing something "better" with half your heart. The future needs scientists, engineers, gardeners, farmers, tea-makers, washers-up, police, prophets, artists, poets, film-makers, critics, storytellers, and—most of all—friends.
