Roy Scranton teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame, where he also serves as the Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative. He has written several books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and the novel War Porn.
What’s the big idea?
Despite the heroic efforts of numerous scientists, activists, and concerned politicians, national and international climate policies have repeatedly failed. Climate change is already impacting society in significant ways, and it is unclear and unlikely that we will be able to avoid a crash course with disastrous future effects. This appraisal may sound jarring in our abundantly optimistic messaging about environmental hope, but the truth is that pessimism is the most ethical and productive response to climate change.
Below, Roy shares five key insights from his new book, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress. Listen to the audio version—read by Roy himself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Climate change is just one aspect of today’s polycrisis.
The complex crises and challenges we face today are not only political and environmental, but also narrative and philosophical. The trouble we face today is so huge, so complicated, and so abstract that it not only exceeds our ability to address it but outstrips our capacity to understand what is happening. The stories, frameworks, values, and structures through which we make sense of reality are insufficient to comprehend or cope with the ecological, geological, and existential consequences of modern science, industrial society, and global human development.
Take, for instance, the politics of climate change. The core science behind understanding climate change is sound and apolitical: evidence shows increased human-caused atmospheric carbon dioxide and rising global temperatures, and more than a century of well-established science strongly connects these two phenomena.
But partisan polarization on a range of issues warps most people’s perception of climate change in dramatic and confusing ways. Republicans tend to dismiss climate change and climate science, while Democrats tend to erroneously overestimate their own knowledge of the subject, treat climate change as an issue of personal morality rather than global policy, and favor unrealistic solutions that have more to do with other political goals than rational responses to global ecological transformation. Because the problem is seen as a marker of political identification, there doesn’t seem to be any good way to build a reasonable consensus around the issue.
2. We’ve reached the limits of progress.
Progress has never been a question of fact. Certainly, the past two hundred years have been marked by changes that many people identify as progress: a decrease in infant mortality, an increase in aggregate wealth, a rise in global population, and an increase in technological sophistication, among others. The trajectory is undeniable. It’s also the anomalous product of a temporary, one-time surge of cheap energy provided by fossil fuels.
Whether this trajectory can continue is another question entirely, for which empirical science tends to provide pessimistic answers. Perhaps more to the point, however, is that none of these changes have any demonstrable connection to moral, political, or cultural progress—unless we take modern society to exemplify the highest form of social development for which the entirety of history is the just-so story explaining how we got here. Progress is a myth, by which I mean a deep, powerful, and collective narrative that holds society together and organizes collective action toward goals perceived as collective goods.
“The narrative glue holding society together is beginning to crack.”
Unfortunately, the success of science and industry over the past two centuries has created conditions under which continued and future development almost certainly leads to an apocalyptic collapse. Progress means increasing human control over nature, but the more impact we have on nature, the more we destabilize and undermine our own habitat. Nature is more complex than we can fully account for, so whenever we attempt to fix something, we typically create new problems.
Another reason progress will almost certainly lead to global collapse is that we don’t understand ourselves. Social change remains mysterious and resistant to quantitative research, and as the sciences, engineering, computer programming, and business have taken center stage in universities, the patient self-reflection of humanistic study has declined. We have knowledge without wisdom and power without humility. The strain is manifest. The narrative glue holding society together is beginning to crack.
3. Human reason has limits.
One of the most powerful ways in which human reason is limited is through our pervasive, unconscious optimism. As researchers like Tali Sharot have shown, the majority of human beings are relentlessly, unrealistically, and even dangerously optimistic: we think we can get more done than we can, we think we’ll be more successful than we are, we think people like us better than they do, we think we’re better drivers than we are, and so on and so on.
Every aspect of our sensory and cognitive engagement with reality is shaped by prejudicial biases, heuristic shortcuts, reductive narratives, emotional and sometimes illogical commitments, and psychological affordances adapted to life in a colder, harsher world, in which human collectives were fairly small and directly dependent on a close, embodied, and spiritual relationship with nature. The human organism that evolved in the Pleistocene is powerfully maladapted to the kind of habitat we’ve created for ourselves on Earth today, and more importantly, limited in its ability to understand and consciously control what it’s doing.
“The human organism that evolved in the Pleistocene is powerfully maladapted to the kind of habitat we’ve created for ourselves on Earth today.”
Recognizing the limits of human reason undermines the power of progress as a motivating narrative, casts doubt on our ability to address complex global problems, and suggests that our conventional strategies for addressing them—such as informing voters and relying on democratic self-determination to get things right—are likely to fail.
4. Climate conversations that stoke fear get things done.
Most climate change messaging is emphatically and even dogmatically optimistic, positive, and focused on what can be done, to the point of dismissing and even denigrating pessimistic or negative assessments that either warn people about the most dangerous consequences of climate change or express skepticism about the political pathways available to address it.
Over and over again, high-profile climate change scientists and science journalists have insisted that fear doesn’t help and we need to focus on solutions. The problem is that they don’t really know what they’re talking about. The broad consensus of contemporary social science and communication research indicates that negative messaging is generally effective in motivating action, at least in the short term, and is decisively more effective than positive messaging, which can lead to complacency. Fear works, most of the time. Not talking about the worst-case scenarios is not only irresponsible but ineffective.
5. Pessimism is a robust, ethical, resilient, and healthy response to uncertainty.
One worry people have about negative messaging is that it might lead to pessimism, which critics often conflate with nihilism, apathy, and despair. But if you look at the psychology of optimism and pessimism, the long philosophical history of the two ideas, and the comparative ethical implications of taking either an optimistic or a pessimistic view toward the world, I think you’ll see the virtue in my fifth, final, and most important insight.
Whether we’re drawing from the Biblical wisdom of Ecclesiastes, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the philosophical tradition of Voltaire and Arthur Schopenhauer, or the research of contemporary psychologists such as Julie Norem, the core truths of pessimism are hard to dismiss: Suffering is inevitable. Consciousness itself can be painful. The unpredictability of events threatens our goals in ways we can never wholly foresee. Stuff happens. People fail. Conflict is unavoidable. Everybody dies.
Turning these realizations into ethical action depends on recognizing that while everyone’s suffering is unique, everyone suffers. It’s unavoidable. It’s life. And it always feels terrible. Pessimism is fundamentally about recognizing and living with our natural limits. It’s about recognizing that suffering is both universal and inevitable, but also particular and maybe even sometimes treatable. It’s not about giving up or succumbing to despair, but rather being realistic about what we can hope for and what we might accomplish.
“Pessimism is fundamentally about recognizing and living with our natural limits.”
Pessimism might be skeptical toward utopian narratives that promise miraculous solutions for perennial human problems, but it’s also fundamentally compassionate toward other people who are vulnerable, just like us; fallible, just like us; and suffering, just like us. Pessimism is about accepting the people around us for who they are and doing our best to work with them, regardless. It’s about accepting the broken world we’ve been thrown into while also working to make whatever repairs we can along the way. Pessimism is about embracing a radical and paradoxical hope: the hope that life might still be worth living after the end of the world.
We almost certainly can’t fix climate change, and we probably can’t stop it. The dream of progress that’s motivated American society throughout its history may finally be hitting the hard limits of reality. Human reason may simply never be able to fully explain the world we live in or why we do what we do. People seem to be more motivated by fear and a sense of group belonging than they are by rational calculation. The future looks grim and is probably only going to get worse.
But that’s okay, because we don’t need to believe in progress. The myth of progress is a story that developed during the Enlightenment to justify and rationalize European colonial expansion, then got supercharged by cheap fossil fuels. It’s a story that refuses to account for the durability of essential human characteristics, and it’s a story that doesn’t have any good way to make sense of climate change.
The impasse we face is both environmental and political, but it’s also existential: there’s no way for the world as we know it to continue as it is. Thankfully, progress isn’t the only story we’ve ever used to make sense of our lives. Countless stories from the past may offer early drafts of whatever new story we’ll eventually use to make sense of human life in the future. Most of our past stories have acknowledged and accepted limits, whether through the concept of original sin, Buddhist samsara, or indigenous responsibility to the Earth, among other approaches. The difficult situation we’re in now is that we have to live out this chaotic period between one story ending and another beginning. This is our impasse, and pessimism may be our only hope.
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