Welcome or welcome back, day three of what it feels like (to one white over-educated cis-hetero white male) to live in the first bits of the collapse, whether it’s 18 weeks, months or even years (not that I am intending to do daily 1k blogs beyond 31 days. Unless someone pays me.)
Since yesterday the Los Angeles Times has done a good piece on the North Atlantic temperature anomaly, “the NATO that may get us all killed.” Shout out to Hayley Smith, the journo for the piece, titled “Ocean temperatures are off the charts, and El Niño is only partly to blame,”
And doubtless masters theses about the “great warming panic of 2023” are being planned. I hope I get to read them – as in I hope they get completed. And I hope to read five years hence the PhD that they’re based on
In other news, Private Eye has arrived- here’s a fun El Nino cartoon (#NotAllFootballFans – see here, of course, and see this book, from the penultimate wave of climate concern).
And this tweet from West Cumbria Rivers Trust is cheerful.
See full story here.
There is this thing that is hard to explain. But we’ve all been through it, I think. And so it shouldn’t be hard to explain. It’s the gap between what we know intellectually to be true to becoming and our ability emotionally to process it. And the wishful thinking and hoping against hope. And sends me back to the novel Z for Zachariah, by Robert O’Brien, which I read in my early teens standard, post apocalyptic post nuclear war fair. And I distinctly remember being challenged, aged 13 or 14, by a passage where the narrator who is, I think a 14 year old girl describes how she and the visitor to her valley (somehow untouched by the nukes) both know intellectually that his exposure to radiation means that he is definitely going to get all the horrible symptoms of radiation sickness and it’s not clear whether he’ll live or not. But for now, while he is healthy and walking about, neither of them can quite accept it. That struck me as odd. Then my English teacher, maybe I was 14 or 15 mean given who that was, said “no that’s how humans operate.” And we’re in that on a large scale intellectually we know that there are going to be consequences but we’re still somehow somehow in the “it can’t happen to me because I’m a good person” or “I’m safe because I’m a smart person look at my technology” phase.
Afterwards, once it has properly started, we will look back in disbelief at our ability to fool ourselves. But we shouldn’t be surprised human beings are very very good at seeing what they need to and avoiding – to coin a phrase – an Inconvenient Truth
Digression – I seem to have found the Moorhen family from a couple of days ago and gave as much as a feed as I could without alerting the bloody ducks. So that’s good.
Back to the doom.
So finally, today I’m going to start talking about growth
Growth is the religion of the post-World War world understandably given the experience of the Depression and the terror of the Second World War culminating as it did with the awesome in every sense, power of the bomb (according to the Peace News I read, Churchill, by then out as PM, lobbied Truman not to use it, arguing there were other ways to end the Pacific war).
Growth solves a lot of problems, political, cultural, even spiritual, and to sum it up in a word deferral.. As long as you’re moving quote forward, unquote As long as the pie is growing, you can defer questions of not just justice also purpose. Growth becomes an end in itself and politicians can be judged not on their intelligence probity, farsightedness but on their ability to deliver growth – to get a chicken in every pot, two chickens in every pot and a bigger pot
It allows for awkward questions of interspecies intergenerational justice and of course intraspecies and intra-society justice to be swatted aside
Growth is your all purpose “Get Out of Jail for any crime” card and its value can be seen in quite how hysterical and unreasoning the response to the Limits to Growth book in 1972 was Academics who ought to know better, but emotionally couldn’t know better, simply being unable to do more than spout bullshit like “Malthus with a computer.” Not SPRU’s finest moment
In the absence of growth those questions which have been deferred dismissed. swatted, the side sneered at become much harder to dodge. Growth is the soothing lullaby that will fix all of our problems and growth.
At this point, to get closer to my 1k goal, Imma hit you with a great quote I’ve used repeatedly, from a book called Friendly Fascism, by a guy called Bertram Gross. Published in 1980, just as the Thatcher/Reagan era was getting under way.
“If we just enlarge the pie, everyone will get more”. This has been the imagery of Capitalist growthmanship since the end of World War II- and I once did my share in propagating it. But the growth of the pie did not change the way the slices were distributed except to enlarge the absolute gap between the lion’s share and the ant’s. And whether the pie grows, or stops growing, or shrinks, there are always people who suffer from the behaviour of the cooks, the effluents from the oven, the junkiness of the pie, and the fact that they needed something more nutritious than pie anyway.”
Look, growth in some things is good in education, in moral maturity in tolerance (the world is significantly less terrible for some gay people, some women etc). Growth of cancer cells – not so much. Growth in carbon dioxide emissions? Well, that’s why I’m blogging.
Throw more topics at me by the way. Tell me I am wrong and why. Tell me things I should read/watch.
marchudson.net 
Marc, I am not sure we are looking at “collapse”, but we are looking at a not too slow decline. As for GROWTH, sadly I cannot agree! In fact rather than growth in education, I see reduction, which aided by AI, will I feel get worse. “Moral maturity” and “tolerance”, come on! Surely, there is an increasing lack of both?
Australia seems to be the only country where the people aren’t turning against their leaders and the way things are going even that may not last.
GROWTH it all it’s forms, seems to me to be the cause of all the worlds troubles.
I need to define my terms better, I guess. As Bill Clinton might have said, “it depends if your definition of collapse collapses.” I will tackle this in another post…
On moral maturity – bad word perhaps – I was thinking (but not being specific!) about how for some gay people (certainly not in Uganda) and some women (mostly middle-class) life is a lot less fraught compared with the 1950s. Homosexuality decriminalised, abortion available (now of course being rolled back in the USA). I should have been specific.
I think people are turning against their (political) leaders because those leaders either have no answers for the horrors of neoliberalism, or are active cheerleaders for it. So, turning against leaders is not necessarily a sign of moral decay!
Many thanks for commenting, btw.