Timing is everything – of spine-eels, climate change and having no idea what you are into

There’s a scene near the beginning of the third (and best?) Bourne film. Bourne (Matt Damon) is meeting a journo (Paddy Considine) at Waterloo, with men with bad intentions all around. Considine is asking questions and Bourne says “you have no idea what you are into here.” Which turns out to be rather – and brutally – true minutes later. Funny what sticks with you.

At a species level, a ‘human civilisation’ level, we have no idea what we are into here. Part of the trouble is that some dodgy (understandable but still dodgy) claims of imminent doom were made in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and when those did not come to pass (thank goodness), it allowed the deniers of limits to growth to prosper largely unchallenged. The deeper trouble is that nothing in our evolutionary make-up, or in the way that we “educate” our young, or our governance systems allows us to see the trouble we are in, not directly anyway.

“We” and “our” apply in the second half of that last sentence apply largely to the rich extractivist mofos like you and me. Without going all romantic “noble savage” about indigenous peoples, they tend to have been more skeptical about Progress, for various reasons (1).

“Our” science turns out not to be terribly good at second and third order effects, at multipliers and synergies.

In response to this on Bluesky

I wrote the following

You can read the short story on archive.org

We are like little children with a boxful of matches, fascinated at our own power and already having burnt down our house, feeling the warmth and chortling ‘look how clever we are.’

Footnotes

(1) But plenty of everyone gets seduced by the dreams of limitless comfort, ease, access to positional goods blah blah. Again, no noble savages.